I applied online. I interviewed at ActiveVideo in Mar 2021
Interview
It was quite ordinary interview including next parts: HR interview, interview with 2 software developers, interview with an architecture and interview with a head of IT department. The process was pretty concentrated and intrviews went one by one. It took only 3hrs to complete this interview process. I also was asked to do a test task.
I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at ActiveVideo (Hilversum) in Apr 2019
Interview
I applied online in 2019. At the beginning, I was a little bit worried that the company had so low rating - 2.3. But decided to proceed because of nice job description. The first step was to solve programming test where I needed to solve three tasks: the first one - was the simplest (I don't remember what it was about), the second task was to find a bug and fix it, and the last one was to solve DP problem. It wasn't a problem to get 100% score. I was invited to the next step. The second step was a 1 hour Skype interview that was called as a technical one, but it wasn't - it was some kind of technical talk. After that I was invited to on-site interview in Hilversum. The company bought tickets and booked a hotel. And at the beginning it was looked like they forgot about the interview because there was a 30 minutes delay. So the first interview session didn't start at all. The next hour I was interviewed by manager and architect - just technical talk, my background discussion and so on. The second hour I was interviewed by two developers - discussion around C++, one simple programming task, and one vague task to optimize video stream by architecture. The next 5 minutes I spent with HR, and the last person did't came at all because he decided to stay at home this day. They promised to call me the next day, but they didn't contact me at all.
To sum up, it was the most irresponsible and disorganized interview in my life. It's abnormal when interview is delayed and some of the interviewers do not come to interview at all without any substitution. Frankly speaking I have just wasted my time. During the conversation with developers, I found out that they mostly maintain existed code base and trying to resolve perfomance issues. Additionally, they complained about small amount of build machines to test their feature branches. And the office is dull and a little bit depressing, not typical for IT area.
After some time I noticed that company decided to increase their raiting here, and now it is 3.2. The suspicious moment here is that the most of the 5-star reviews are written during the short period of time with almost the same template.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Optimize architecture for video stream from server to customers.