ActiveState reviews

ActiveState used to be an amazing place to work — truly people-oriented, caring, and built around the idea that employees mattered. Under previous leadership, the company fostered a supportive environment where collaboration, trust, and goodwill weren’t just slogans. It genuinely felt like a community. The new CEO is not necessarily the problem. He is very strategy-oriented and decisive, which can be positive in certain contexts. But the challenges ActiveState faces are deeper and more systemic than any one leader. The company has shifted from a culture of empowerment to one defined by urgency, fear, and constant churn.

There's a lot to like about ActiveState, but the most important factor in all of it is that we have a really good upper management team, starting with the CEO. If you have questions or concerns, they are always available to hear them and they respond well. If they don't know the answer immediately they will tell you so and set a date for future updates ("I'll look into this and get back to you by next Friday"). A good example is that soon after I was hired I realized they did not have a 401k plan set up for US employees. This wasn't anything malicious, it was simply because no other US employees had asked for one and most of the staff, including the CEO, are in Vancouver, BC. The folks who would be in charge of this simply weren't familiar with how these work or why they were necessary. I had just assumed they had a 401k plan and so finding out was a big deal for me. The CEO took my concerns seriously and kept me up to date while he and the VP of Finance looked into this. And now we have a 401k plan for US employees. There have been other issues I've had since that time and they've always been handled in the same way. I get a clear response from the executives and updates as needed. I don't always get what I want but that's to be expected. Another really nice thing about working here is that it's a small company where you can have a lot of influence on the things you care about. For example, I didn't like our open source contribution policy. When I brought this to the CTO he asked me to write up a new policy that I would like better. I drafted one and worked with the CTO to refine it. Then we brought it to the CEO and we're working to finalize the details before putting it into place. The culture here is very positive. It's mature but still fun, with good communication and very little politics. I expect everyone to act like an adult and they do. The final thing I'll note is that work/life balance is well respected here. One quarter someone on my team ended up working a lot of extra hours to meet some customer obligations. While he was praised for being willing to do this the CEO also wanted to know _why_ that was necessary at all. His goal was to make sure we could avoid this in the future rather than making this sort of heroic effort the norm.