How we updated our Performance Review process to help engineers grow
Performance reviews are often a nebulous topic. All companies do them and they can be incredibly important to growth and success, both personally and professionally. Yet they are often a bit of a black box. At Wealthfront, we believe that one of the core goals of the performance review process is to help engineers grow… Read more
Speed Up Your Android Tests: Gradle Plugin for Unit Test Filtering
Writing tests is a fundamental part of writing good software. They help us to catch bugs, be confident in our changes and serve as documentation. At Wealthfront, our Android team relies heavily on our automated test suite to maintain productivity and code quality — until we hit a snag. With our codebase maturing and our… Read more
Revamping Data Fetching Patterns on the Web Platform
Client-side data fetching is an essential part of the web app at Wealthfront. Traditionally, we fetched data from the Wealthfront API globally: we’d load all the data necessary for the entire page and store it in global state for components on the page to pull from. Crucially, the bulk of this data fetching logic was… Read more
Team Crafting using a Team Depth Chart
A highly effective team is more than the sum of its parts because the interplay between team members’ strengths and weaknesses can be crafted into a cohesive unit. This blog post describes a management tool we use at Wealthfront to help craft an effective engineering team. The Challenge Crafting an effective engineering team is a… Read more
Senior Engineer Archetypes
Wealthfront believes in providing engineers opportunities to have impact so they can grow at a pace that matches their experience. However we have observed several instances where high-performing engineers would step up into senior roles and take on new responsibilities, but then unfortunately become unhappy or unsuccessful. When transitioning into senior engineering roles an individual’s… Read more
Principles of Engineering Culture at Wealthfront
Wealthfront is a technology company. We believe software is the key to building products that help our clients build wealth, and our relationship with technology directly determines how good we are at building this software. When engineers onboard at Wealthfront, we give them this document, our Principles of Engineering Culture. These principles describe Wealthfront’s relationship… Read more