I applied for Active Video via a recruiting agency. It took more than a month for the overall process and recruiting agency was really helpful during this entire process. Initially I was a little skeptical for applying for this position considering the organization's low rating on glassdoor and interview experiences shared by fellow interviewees. But I thought not to be judgmental and went ahead with the application for Software Engineer position.   After initial codility test and discussion over skype with a senior person, I was convinced about the company and the work profile. So I accepted their invite to visit the Netherlands office for further discussion. On the interview day, I had a brief initial discussion with HR followed by two technical rounds. First round was with Leads/Managers and discussion revolved around agile processes, my past projects and more technical discussions. It went fairly well. Second round was on C++, the primary technology for which I applied. To my surprise, I was asked only 2 questions in this round and interview was over. One was on C++ and the other was a design question. The focus seemed to be more on the design question. The question was to optimize the Session Manager design. It looked quite a vague question to me but I tried my best to give the justifiable answer. I felt that the team was looking for the answers that matches their product's design.   After around a week, I was communicated that I was not selected. I was a little disappointed but without being judgmental I took it in a positive way and continued my job search.   Suggestions to the organization - It would not be wise to judge someone based on only few selected questions. Especially when candidate is flying from another country for the sole purpose of the interview. There should be enough opportunities given to judge the candidate. I would really suggest to take at least 1-2 technical rounds over skype for the oversees candidate before inviting them to NL so that it saves time and money at both ends.

When I saw initially the 2.3 rate on Glassdor for ActiveVideo I was a little bit circumspect about it, but I wanted to go further and apply. And then the slow and irritating process began. I was contacted back by the company after few days with an online test on Codility in which I scored 88%, due to some performance penalty on one of the problems (probably because the use of C++ STL map was a little bit slower). After one week I asked the HR responsible for my application to give me a feedback. It took days up to a week to come back with a reply that I "qualified" for the next round: a skype interview. The Skype interview went well and I had a very nice discussion about the product with a manager. I waited a week for their answer, but nothing came back. Again I wrote HR directly about the status of my application. Few days later, a reply came that given the test results and the first round of interviews we can proceed to the face to face interview in Hilversum, Netherlands (close to Amsterdam). Even though I worked in the Netherlands, at that time I was back in my home country and I needed to be flown in the Netherlands for the interview. After a ping-pong of e-mails, finally they setup a flight and a one night hotel. The first interview at their office was with the same HR person that I had the e-mailexchange who projected/displayed the same attitude during e-mail conversations. Bored, uninterested in anything we discussed, relaying the same text that probably he says to each candidate. The second round was with a team leader and an engineer of one of the departments. We discussed my professional background, programming languages, and Scala. Then they asked me how I would implement the shuffling cards problem, same like a casino dealer shuffle the deck of cards. An old problem that has many implications and solutions. I tried to explain few of them and eventually they were fine with a sub-optimal solution: meaning to rewrite the values in the vector with new random ones that were checked against a set of unique values each time. Imagine the copy-constructions and destructions of objects inside that vector. But they were fine with that. The third one was with a very nice engineer and the manager that I had the Skype interview. This was the best part: they were both smart, open, cool, interested in discussing solving problems from different angles. I would have loved to work in their team. The last one was with a VP which was very constructive and well structured. I liked this last round also. My general impression is that I did well overall, though we know that the self-feedback and the perception of others can be different. I'm fine with that. Also I know that the Dutch companies seek to find also cultural fitting to the company: how well you as a person communicate, how much you're interested in the quality of the products (all technical interviews were emphasizing the need for testing), how well you collaborate with the others. I was warned by the HR person in the prologue of that interviewing day that it's usually hard to get to the company. But my feel was that I was not under their expectations either. What really bothered me is that I have never gotten back a reply from them. Even though they told me they will announce me within days, after a week I pinged the HR again asking for feedback. Complete silence. I waited for another days (it was before Christmas) and I even talked on Skype with the manager that I had the first round of interviews (he was still in my contacts). He turned to be again a very nice guy and he apologized on behalf of the company for this rudeness and he told me that he will talk to HR to give me an answer. I don't know if he did or not, but by now no answer came from ActiveVideo. They flew me in to Amsterdam, paid for accommodation and booked a half day of interview meetings and they couldn't even write a short, 10 seconds rejection e-mail. I finally agree with the negative reviews of current employees with regard with lack of respect to people. However I have to emphasize once again a group of nice people for their sense of doing things right. After all, ActiveVideo's product, by the book, looks quite compelling.