CodePath EES2024 NOTION - Notes on Success: How To Thrive as a Notion Intern

Hello. Hello. Welcome to the breakout session on Notion from how to sorry, how to thrive as an intern hosted by notion which is the notes on success breakout.

I hope you’re excited to hear from notion. I’m personally a huge fan of notion. So, I’m really excited to be here facilitating the session.

In a second, I’ll be introducing our speakers. But, before that, I wanted to share a couple of reminders with everyone. Number one, please utilize the chat to have conversations and share your thoughts during the session.

We love hearing from you, so keep it up there. Please keep your messages relevant to the topic of the session. And note that our presenters and speakers can see the chat.

All right. Our team will be monitoring the chat and questions may be answered live during the session. So if you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the Q&A.

And following the session, we ask that you complete the brief feedback survey. Your feedback like you heard from Bobby D earlier is really important to us. But with that and all the reminders out of the way, I want to introduce our speakers who’s going to be presenting on how to thrive as an intern.

Thank you to the Notion team and welcome. We look forward to hearing from you. So introducing Shiovani, our university recruiter at Notion with a passion for all things Notion.

Joining in August 2021, she quickly climbed from recruiting ops coordinator to her current role, shaping Notion’s future talent pool. When not scouting the next generation of not not Shiobani’s nurturing plants, cheering on the 49ers or baking up a storm. She’s always ready for a chat and she’s your go-to for insights on the notion journey.

Everybody give it up for Giovani. Hello everyone. Hope everyone is doing good today.

Excited to be here with all of you. And thank you so much for joining our discussion. And thank you so much Daniel for that amazing introduction.

Less for me to say than now. Yes, been at Notion for a little over three years. Have been in this university recruiting role for a little over a year officially.

And a fun fact that Moini Mags and I actually built the foundation for this program a little over two years ago. So, we are excited to give you some more tips and tricks today. And I will pass it over to Mags first to give a little intro on himself and then Moini after.

Hello everyone. My name is Chris. Last name is Magalotti, so most people call me Mags for short.

I’m a recruiter here at Notion. I’ve been here since March of 2022, so coming up on my three year anniversary soon. Previous to notion, I worked at an IoT security company and also spent some time at at Google.

And here at Notion, I mostly recruit for security, infrastructure, and also our internship program, which is why I’m here speaking to all of you. So, very excited for all of you to be here and answer all your questions. Awesome.

And off to Moini. Hi everyone. This is Moini.

I’m the head of contributions at Notion. As Shani and Chris mentioned we started the internship program together fun fact like Chris and I were on the same onboarding batch so we we started at the same time been at notion for around two and a half years right now I’m responsible for four teams at notion the group is called contributions and that includes the editor team the organization and navigation team which includes sidebar and the collaboration team which includes like notion notifications and comments so Yeah, more to more to talk about in some shiard. Awesome.

Well, thank you again for everyone for joining us kind of the run of the show. We’ll we have a couple of set questions. Boi and Chris will be answering and then we will take to Q&A.

So definitely keep dropping any comments or questions in the Q&A chat. And up vote as you see any come in just so we can also answer the ones that all of you are kind of wondering about. But to get us started, I’m going to pass it over to Chris first to talk a little bit about what we look for in potential interns and how you can best prepare for your interviews here.

Cool. To get started on that in terms like what we’re like I guess first off I can start with our process. So for some of you who may be in the process or not in the process yet it’s three main steps.

So the first step is a notion take home assignment where you’re working with notion’s public API. It’s usually the first main step and kind of what we’re looking for is like you know your code quality, your communication, your documentation through this take-home stage. Once you complete that takehome, then you do a virtual onsite with notion and it’s two interviews.

We do a coding interview and a debugging round specifically. Here at Notion, we try to make our coding interviews more realistic than other companies. So if you’re practicing like, you know, leak code stuff, I think that’s I think that’s fine.

Get your brain moving in the correct direction, but we we do try to make some some things a little bit different here at Notion. So, you know, practicing things where you’re like implementing like a data model or like a small class, like an API, that type of stuff can be a lot more useful here at Notion specifically versus maybe some other companies you’re talking to. And then we do do a debugging interview as well.

Notion, most of our codebase is in Typescript. So, it is in Typescript, which can be a little bit, you know, challenging for some, but the goal isn’t to decipher your TypeScript knowledge. It’s to, you know, it’s pretty much like a problem solving interview.

It’s like, hey, do you have any type of type type any type of method to going about debugging an unfamiliar codebase? And then once you pass a virtual on-site, you do a post onsite conversation usually with an engine manager. And this is like your typical kind of like behavioral interview where they talk to you about your prior internships or prior projects or your degree at school or specific clubs that you’re in or maybe you talk maybe you’re talking about some hackathon that you’re part of.

But those three steps is notions interview process. Once you pass that behavioral interview, that’s when you rece that’s when you receive your notion offer. So that’s the process.

And then in terms of what you know, recruiting is looking for, what I’m looking for, right? It can be, you know, there’s a lot of different things that I think can make your resume spike. The most basic stuff which most of you are familiar with, if you do have prior internships, you know, listing those.

Let’s just say you have like your resume, you know, at the top of your resume, maybe have your school listed. And to start with that, you know, you can put your GPA if you want. You definitely don’t have to.

I think what is really useful if you have any specific scholarships you’ve had or any specific groups that you’re a part of, whether they’re in school, out school, those are great. If you have any type of challenging classes that you’ve taken, I think those are also really good. Like University of Michigan, for example, has a operating systems course that is not a requirement, that is known for being like a hard class.

You know, listing specific classes that you’ve taken that you think that were challenging is great. And then from there, if you have that list at the top, maybe you list internships, right, that are that are related to the role that you’re applying for. If you do have other work experience, I don’t know if that’s like the most useful for your resume.

Let’s just say you’re working like part-time at the bookstore or like, you know, something like that, it’s great, but it’s not related to like, you know, the engineering internship that you’re applying for. So, you can add that. You don’t have to, though.

And if you don’t have internships there, just listing projects is very useful. And in terms of projects, I personally think that you know some of your classes might have group projects that you’re part of. I think that’s fine as well.

If you are able to list projects that you’ve personally worked on that are more recent, I think that’s like the perfect the perfect thing to list. Sometimes I see resumes where a project was listed, you know, four years ago or five years ago. That’s not as relevant just because it’s so old.

So if you have recent projects you’re able to list on there, that that’s great. But yeah, that that that would be the breakdown I think is like the perfect scenario. Like your school, tough classes, things you’re a part of, internships or projects, you know, if you want to put like hobbies and stuff at the bottom, that’s also perfectly fine.

But like as a recruiter, those are things that I’m looking for specifically. Now, as you progress in our interview process, you know, what your interviewer is looking for in the coding round and the interviewer looking for in the debugging portion is completely different than Ryan as a recruiter, right? But the the basics, that’s, you know, that’s what I’m looking for.

Thank you for going into detail. Also, I feel like hopefully that answered a lot of folks questions about what does a process look like and then yeah, what are we even looking for as we’re going through these applications just because there’s so many. And I will pass it to Moini next to answer a little bit more about what do we do internally to make sure we set our interns up for success at Notion.

And to just give you a little bit more of a rundown of what that process will look like for you post offer. Yeah. So, we do a couple of things here to set our interns up for success.

One of the big things is working very closely with your intern manager. So, every intern will have a dedicated intern manager assigned to them that is responsible for day-to-day making sure you know the intern is unblocked. They have all the information they need.

But just basically being the point of contact for any questions related to notion team or project. And then we also make sure that this intern manager figures out a project that can be broken down into multiple milestones. So we specifically ask them to break it down into like three milestones given the 12week internship.

So basically you know with every milestone you can see if you’re on track and you’re you know making good progress and they can give you feedback along the way. So that’s the goal. We also make sure the projects are more like you know in the P 0 P1 path for notion and these are not side projects.

I know you know some companies like you don’t work on the important stuff and that’s not a good experience for interns. So we make sure that you know the interns are working on the most critical things for the business. And then finally throughout the internship we have touch points bi-weekly with both the interns to ask us any questions that come up but with also intern managers on like you know how they can set up their interns for success.

There’s a lot of like you know intern boarding events that Shivani hosts that you know helps with all the interns in the same badge like make connections. But we also make sure that we can assign a buddy to every intern which is outside their team and this really helps them for like you know networking within notion and outside of the team and you know getting to know other teams. So yeah those are like you know on broad strokes a lot of the different things we do to make sure the you know intern is supported and they have the right network.

Yeah. And I feel like it also is about making the most of your opportunity as well. So if there are things that maybe you want to like learn a little bit more about or if something that you are interested in maybe doesn’t directly align with what maybe the project or team you’re on I feel like notion so welcoming to have you trying so many things which is honestly always possible as well.

It’s really just about how you make the most time out of your experience as well. And so to dive more a little bit into that, back to Mahini on how do you make the most out of your internship experience and that can be at notion or elsewhere, but how do you make sure outside of your project work that interns can get involved? And how is that even possible?

Yeah. So I think really embracing our operating values is probably the best way to make the most of your internship. The the first and foremost for especially people early in their career is pace setting.

Which is like you know don’t wait to hit the deadlines right like this is not you know typical school assignments where you’ll have dates for things to be done by and then you know usually people do that one day before one night before right like constantly every day get the most of what you can do in your role and you know set the pace and you know move really fast and you know so that’s the biggest thing we encourage people to do second is taking really ownership of your role and what I mean by this is, you know, not getting bogged down by I’m just an intern here. I don’t know things. Is this a dumb question?

Is this a dumb idea? Right? Like not feeling like you’re empowered to do things is the biggest bottleneck that most people early in their career run into.

And we really want to encourage them to bring your whole selves. Like there’s no dumb question, there’s no dumb idea. Anything that you’re excited about doing, you should pursue it, you should talk about it.

And you know, you should build a prototype for it. So really taking ownership. If you see problems, go fix it.

So that that’s really what is ownership. And then finally, one thing that I’ve always seen people early in their career do is they they bias so much on trying to solve problem on their own that they don’t leverage the network or their co-workers as much. So a lot of times what people will end up doing is like they’ll end up spending like 3 days trying to figure out something in the code that is not working and then you know and at the end of 3 days they pair with somebody and then they get resolve that within 5 minutes and it’s a very common pitfall that most early career people run into and the advice I always give people time box whatever you’re doing right like 1 hour in general is a good time box if you’re not making progress and you feel you’re stuck feeling like you can ask questions and unblock yourself.

That’s the most important because end of the day, we want you to make progress. We want you to learn and make the most of your time. And so, if you’re stuck on something and just spinning your wheels doesn’t really feel like the most effective use of your time, especially when you’re only there for 12 weeks.

So, you know, lean on to your intern manager, lean onto your team, lean on to literally any edge or notion to to unblock yourself. But I think in general, these apply to any other company you would intern at. Thank you for honestly diving more deeper into how to make the most of your experience outside of just the project.

And honestly most likely the case at Notion and most other companies as well. Everyone’s just super excited to have interns and have folks that are early career and to like set that scene for them wherever they do end up. And so exactly like Moini said, lean on as many people as you can there because more often than not they’re super willing to just kind of guide you and help you through the way.

Question for both Moini and Chris. So Chris, I will pass it over to you first to give Moini a break. But what is your biggest piece of advice for someone starting out earlier in their career whether it be postgrad or kind of gearing up to go for internships?

I would say just networking. And again, I’m guessing most of the potential people we’re speaking with here have heard this before. But maybe you’re a part of a club and maybe in that specific club there’s members that are at specific companies you want to work at, like reaching out to them, learning more about how they can start in the process, trying to get referrals that way.

Networking with people from your specific school, from specific clubs, from your specific classes. I got my first job from a referral from a friend from from school and a lot of my my my co-workers earlier in my career and currently did as well. You know, networking is always is always the most useful thing specifically.

Also just like being a sponge you know where you are in your age right now your mind is just able to take in so much knowledge and learn. If you have like any type of specific like things that are like for example maybe you’re doing general software engineering or specific school but you have a big passion for like mobile or security specifically or something like that like you know making sure you kind of run with that even if you don’t think it’s be a part of like your career in the short term. A lot of those more niche positions are very in demand right now here at Notion.

I feel like a lot of schools you just go for computer science specifically, but it doesn’t really give you a specific path on which way to go. Security, mobile, infrastructure, like those are all really great routes and you can learn more about that through whether it’s extra extracurricular activities or classes you take on the side or something like that. I think that is really great especially if you’re trying to go trying to be a software engine like long term.

Those would be like my two main things. And then to you Moini for your piece of advice or pieces of advice. Definitely plus one on the networking.

And I I I like the spawn analogy, but broadly speaking, I think early in your career, I think just embracing growth mindset is very important and really focusing on learning and development and building the right foundations is so important. Like a lot of times I I have people who will come in and you know they’re thinking about you know promotion or they’re thinking about getting to the next level. And I strongly encourage you to not worry about those things and just focus on learning because if you learn and you grow and your foundations are strong everything else will just work out for you, right?

So as Chris mentioned the sponge analogy, right? Like this is the time to truly embrace growth mindset and learn and especially when you’re getting like constructive feedback. Being able to take that feedback and get that perspective and then course correct yourself is so important, right?

Like most people who are giving giving you growth feedback early in your career have your best intent in mind and they want you to grow and excel. And so not getting defensive, right? And figuring out, oh, maybe I didn’t see this through because these are people with experience and they’re giving you feedback.

So, how can you make the most of it? But also leveraging your positive things that people talk about, right? Like making them your strengths, being like, "Yeah, I do this really well.

I should really double down on it." so yeah, just use this as, you know, these are your foundational years and everything you can do to make a better version of yourself. That’s what you should be focusing on. Amazing.

Thank you both. And then one follow-up question for you, Moini. What was a kind of lesson that you did not learn until later in your career that you would think would be useful for early career folks to know specific to engineering?

Yeah. Our head of engineering uses this quote which I really relate with recently which is be brill be brief, be brilliant, be gone. And a lot of times early in our career what we make a mistake of is you know we are rambling.

We say things like as five pages docs we write and then we share that and we expect people to read it. But really everybody has a lot of responsibilities. People are busy and if you can communicate your thoughts to people in the most succinct way possible that’s how you keep attention right.

So bullet points are great, right? Like usually if somebody sends me a doc with five pages, most likely it’s going into my backlog and when I’ll have the clear space, I’ll read it. But if somebody sends me like five bullet points to read, I will read it right off and they’ll get an answer from me right away.

And so this is the the the key where you know the the way our head of engineering fuzzy mentioned it is like you know early in my career I used to write these long emails and nobody would respond to my emails. I didn’t really understand what happened. Why are people not responding to my emails?

I have so much good content in there. Really, what is happening is just people are being overwhelmed and it’s going on everybody’s back burner. So figuring out how do you get your point across to your audience without overwhelming them is very important.

So, it’s actually harder to be brief. It’s actually harder to, you know, connect the point in bullet points versus writing like long paragraphs. So figuring out ways to do that.

That is great advice. That makes me think I have a lot of work to do today on some of the docs I have. But thank you so much for sharing that.

And honestly, yes, completely agree now that you kind of gave that perspective of when it’s five pages, there’s less likelihood of me reading it right away versus if you’re giving me five bullet points, I will read it and then I will respond likely right away. Amazing. Thank you.

And then one final fun question before we go to Q&A for both of you. And Mags, I will kick it off to you first. What would you want to be doing with your life if work wasn’t a concept?

And this is like a loaded question, so you may take a while. Is is money like not not involved? Also, money is not a issue as well.

Got it. A big reason why I like my job here at Notion outside of like outside of actually what I do is because I feel like my week to week is actually pretty low stress compared to most jobs. So thinking through that, I would also want something like low stress, high dopamine.

So money wasn’t an option, maybe I would be like a game tester or something like that. That’d be really fun, Video Game tester. Or maybe I would like open a skate shop or work at like a surf shop by beach.

Something like that would be like my my my thing if I didn’t if I didn’t need money specifically and could do whatever I want. Great great options. Honestly, I think a video game tester would be very fun.

And then Moini to you. I think I would just want to travel around the world and you know meet a lot of people. I think one thing you know the reason I am in my role is I love working with people and you know people just bring me energy but having the ability not worrying about money and just traveling around the world meeting a lot of different people from different cultures like you know absorbing all of that and knowing everybody’s story I think that would be like amazing for me life-changing so one day when I retire I would definitely want to do that is my parents just retired and so they were just in Greece they’re going to Fiji They’re going to Singapore.

I was like, "Oh my gosh, living their best life." So, that is also exactly what I hope to do like 30 years from now, which might be a little too early, but I can agree. Amazing. Okay.

Thank you all so much for answering our already pre-written questions. I have refreshed our up votes and am slowly just going to go down our Q&A question and chat. And the first two questions I’m just going to answer because I know the answer to them and then I’ll hand it off to both of you if there’s anything I don’t.

But unfortunately we are not offering any new grad opportunities right now. And so internship through internship conversion is the best way to get a full-time offer to Notion if you are early career. Hopefully in the future that may change but just as of now for the near term that is unfortunately not on our radar.

And then does not have opportunities for international students? Yes. There are I would say yes and no. It just caveat of like visa situation.

So we would just need to as your application comes through make sure we are able to sponsor properly. And so then it’s kind of like a yes no question. It’s case by case basically.

And then our next question whether Mags or Muini if you want to take this what does notion expect from incoming interns? What kind of specific tools are useful for interns to know before notion? And then would help them be a good candidate.

I think maybe Max, this would be a good question for you. If you want to answer that one. Can you hear me?

Okay. Still, Shioani? Yes.

Okay, cool. Screen just changed for a little bit. In terms of useful things as interns, I would say some of the things I’ve already been listed, but make sure that you’re very open to, feedback.

We’re here like whoever your mentor is, your manager is, your team, specific team that you’re allocated to, like being able to implement the feedback that you’re given is definitely a big positive and that I would I would say most of you probably already know that. They already know that as well, but we’re here to help you. If you ever need help with anything, sometimes we, you know, sometimes situations where interns like, oh, I have this problem and I want to fix it and I don’t really need anyone’s help.

They need to put their head down and work. And sometimes that can be detrimental. Like if you need help like I said we we are here to help you specifically that’s like one of the main things get get out of your comfort zone outside of like your mentor and your team manager specifically there’s other members of your team that are also there to help you have cross cross functional partners that can help you like you have plenty of resources here at notion that can help you throughout your notion internship that you should utilize fully outside of that like more other stuff like notion’s tech stack we use typescript we use AWS and all the services that come with that are data basis postgress for most different things like if you have prior experience using some of our tech stack that’s also like a big positive if you don’t that’s also perfectly fine too one of the things you’re graded on during your internship here at notion is mastery so maybe you’re on a specific team where you’re using some specific tooling or tech stack you don’t you know you’re not familiar with maybe you learn that very well so yeah those are like some areas I think that that that are useful awesome thank you so much Mags and then the next question down the online.

Our applications for the winter internship still being reviewed. Internship apps for both winter and summer are still actively being reviewed. There is just a very high volume and so I’m so sorry it is just taking a little bit longer for Magnai to get through everyone u and get you an answer on if we’re moving forward or not.

Hopefully we’ll have more time as October progresses to just all get you an answer sooner rather than later. And then our internships open to graduating seniors. Answered this a little bit earlier and there’s another question down in the chat, but you do have to have at least a quarter or semester left of schooling to be considered for an internship, whether that be winter or summer.

And so if you are actively going to be graduated before May of 2025, winter could be an option. Again, we just need to case by case scenario, kind of have that conversation before we, just know what the kind of options are looking like for your specific case. Awesome.

So, yeah, and then I just answered the following question. Okay, maybe this is a question for Moini. Do not interns get to do meaningful work that eventually gets used in the codebase?

Yeah. Alluded to this a little bit earlier but we make sure that interns are definitely working on things that go into production and are in the P 0 P1 critical path for the company. So none of the work will not land into the hands of the user or be a site thing that is not meaningful.

This is something very important to us. You know, all of us who designed this program have been an intern at some point and really appreciated seeing our work being used by others. So, we we try to have the same thing for our interns as an experience.

Awesome. Thank you so much. And then, oh my gosh, I’m getting lost in all these questions.

There’s so many. Thank you for adding them all. Amazing.

There’s a question about and this is just like a general question. If I applied to the notion suite internship and never received an OA, is there a way to push my application now to receive one? We will look I’m wondering after all of this, we’ll kind of maybe get a idea of like who actually joined our session and can kind of see on who was at our session, who’s applied to our roles and then maybe we can cross reference or cross check.

Will there be any opportunities regarding product management and product design? Hot off the presses, our product design internship is actually going to be going live, hopefully this week. So if any of you are interested in that, that will be going live soon and it will be on LinkedIn and Mags and I and our Andrew Randy who lead design will also likely be posting about it.

So yay, excited for that. And then no product management kind of opportunities as of right now, but also maybe down the line will be something that we do consider. And a question from Aini, what are some of the most exciting technical challenges the engineering team is currently working on and how do interns typically contribute to solving these challenges?

So maybe we can first talk about what technical challenges we are actively kind of doing on our own and then how interns can contribute can be a separate question. Yeah, there were a couple of challenges and I think this is typical of startups is early in the journey you know we are trying to establish product market fit and so a lot of the engineering time is really spent in building features and you know seeing how much traction we can get from our customers for those features and there’s not a lot of focus or engineering time that is being spent on the engineering per per se right like thinking about performance thinking about scalability, thinking about testing. But you know, as the product market fit for the company is established and we know this company is here to stay and more engineers are getting added, these things become top of mind for the company.

And that’s exactly the phase that we are in at Notion where we’re like, okay, we’ve built these features in the quickest possible way because you know we were trying to establish if it’s a valuable feature but we never thought about the system design for this feature and this is not the most performant feature. Now how do we rewrite this so it can be faster? So that’s something you know for a lot of the things we are revisiting all the time.

And interns have this opportunity as well is like you know any code base that you’re touching and you’re seeing opportunities to make things faster go go do that. Similarly testing right like we didn’t have early in the day’s time to you know introduce tests for everything and we relied on manual testing a lot but as the company grows the value of automated testing becomes more and more centric to making sure development can happen in a efficient manner and so going and adding the necessary test so we can catch regressions automatically and we can be confident about you know the changes that we are making but also scale right as the company was small we were not worried about like a thousand people company and supporting a 10,000 people company and so we didn’t really have to worry about when thinking from a system design perspective how do we build a feature that can support so many users in parallel but now we need to worry about that and so that again involves a lot of redesigning and rearchitecting I would say performance and testing are much easier for interns to contribute to a lot of scalability related changes are more involved and usually typically ally require more than 12 weeks and these are longunning projects. So, usually it’s hard for interns to contribute to something like that.

So yeah, those are those I would say the three broad spectrums. Awesome. Thank you so much for diving a little bit there, Roini.

And then a question for both of you actually, and this is a good one. What is your most memorable conversation you’ve had with an intern or a candidate during an interview? I’m going to broaden the scope to this to maybe even when they were at Notion as an intern.

Maybe if you want to do both as an interview and then maybe when they were an intern as well. I can go first. Not so much for an intern, but I’ve had I mean because because I’m a part of internship program, I talk to a lot of students.

So hearing about some of their interests are are pretty cool. So I spoke to to someone who like made their own LLC, which is like their own company, and had, you know, built like four or five different games on Steam. Which I thought was really cool.

And then during the call, he like sent me a link to the games and like presented it to me and everything. And myself, I’m really into like role playing games, and this specific student had made like a ton of different role playing games like by themselves. So I thought that was really cool.

They’re not an intern here at Notion, but just like the the interesting things that interns are working on in their personal in their personal life, I think is like really really interesting. So yeah, thank you. I was thinking hard about this one and the one that jumps out to me is a intern presentation from our one of our first batch of interns where she she worked on API related changes and usually if you were to do a presentation on API related changes, it can be quite boring.

But she made it very interesting. She was an phenomenal speaker. She introduced like fake characters into her sharing for the presentation on how it affected them and it just set the new standard of how interns can present like it’s almost like you know you’re explaining a technical concept in a storytelling way or almost say in a jenzy way right and it was so fun everybody enjoyed the presentation and I feel like she did a presentation much better than some of our like you know full-time engineers or you know even I I don’t think I could have done a presentation that well.

So in my mind like the reason this comes up as a memorable thing is she just set a new standard of how can you explain things to people who have no context about it in in a way that they can have fun and they want to listen to you. So yeah. Yeah, I feel I kind of feel the same way with some of our intern presentations that have happened in the last couple of like kind of cohorts now.

Just the way that they kind of present their information. Less less rigid but more just like involvement, more like excitement around the work they did. Just honestly, yeah, keeps everyone more engaged, which is super cool.

And a question I think that I can answer just because this is the part of the program that I manage. Want to learn a little bit more about the and then I’ll actually pass it over to Kristen Moini to answer the first part of this question, but I want to learn more about the culture and working environment at Notion. Are there any special events during the internship duration?

So, I’ll specifically talk about the internship duration and then Magda Moin, maybe you want to talk a little bit more about what you kind of think of the working environment and culture at Notion. But for me specifically, I help kind of plan all of the events for when our cohorts are here during their internships for the winter cohort and the summer cohort. Lots of bonding events, lots of like intern activities, lots of L & D opportunities as well.

I would say a couple off the top of my brain. We’ve gone like pottery making as a group. We’ve done kind of like baseball game days as a group, especially during the summer.

Food making classes, so like pasta making or ramen making. L & D opportunities. So, especially because you’re earlier in your career, making sure that you all have opportunities to just like widen your skill set.

So, whether it be revolving around communication, your coding abilities, just like understanding what it means to get the most out of your internship as well. And then of course just like opportunity for you to get to know not just your team and your intern cohort but the broader company as well. Which is like different events that you can get more involved in.

Like different groups that notion has specifically and yeah and then I will hand it over Moini or Mags. I don’t want to like pick someone but if you want to talk about your experience then kind of how you perceive the culture and working environment. Cool.

Yeah Moini I can go first. Not so much Notion’s culture, but I think Notion, like what really stood out to me during my time here so far has just been the positive environment that Notion has. Like the positive environment that I’ve been a part of here at Notion specifically.

So what I what I mean by that, here at Notion, I feel like we have really good leaders in place that are very transparent with the things that we’re doing well, things we need to do better, things that we need to focus on, changes to our road map. I’ve been at companies where they’re not very transparent. So having like good leadership at the top like really really sets things like on on like a really good trajectory and you as a as a co-orker at that company make you feel very good about where the product is going.

So that was like a a major thing for me. Where notion sizes were a little over 800 employees. A thing that I thought was really important is I wanted to join a company where I feel like I could like make a larger impact versus like a massive company like Facebook or Microsoft etc. And I’ve been able to do that here at Notion.

When I first joined we didn’t have any internship program. And when I when I interviewed with my my current manager, something that I talked to them about was like, "Hey, like I would love to be a part of that program. Not sure what where the program is going to be or where it’s going to go or what I can do, but being a part of that is something that I’m really looking for specifically." So joining a company for you as interns where you know maybe you’re not you know again not sure what you’re looking for whether it’s a massive company or a small company or somewhere in the middle like notion is but being in a company like notion size you’re just naturally going to have a bigger impact here have more visibility meet more cross functional partners like those are all things that will set you up to have like a more positive experience of internship you end up picking and will make your internship experience like more enjoyable overall it’s also just great working for a company that you use the product I was using not ocean before joining notion to like track my spending habits and my workouts and stuff and then I applied and luckily I heard back like so working for a company where like you feel very aligned to the product even like as a recruiter I’m not I’m not building the product right but I I like I love notion as a products like working for a company where you know you use a product daily you like the product it also is just like a big part of just like your overall sentiment in when you’re coming into the office day you know day in and day out you know you really just enjoy like the place that you’re working at specifically and every everything else is just a positive I love my co-workers I love my team I think we’re paid well I think we have good I think we have good benefits I think we work good work balance.

Like it’s a lot of small things that make my experience here at Notion very enjoyable. And that’s again none of that is really focused on like notion’s overall culture. I think Notion has just like done a really good job of making sure that people at Notion are able to bring their authentic self to work and like their their best self and then from that they’re able to do their best work.

So yeah. Awesome. I sorry Moini before you go I want to add on when I was interviewing at notion I also talked about how I wanted to be a part of a uni program and I always talk about how and now Mags I didn’t realize you talked about it either but we basically spoke it into existence and here we are today.

Okay awesome. Now I will pass it over to you Moini. I feel like Max really said everything I would say to this.

So I I would say a lot of plus ones to everything he said transparency being the biggest one. I think this is what makes notion notion and fun for a lot of us. Like I remember when I was in the interview phases and you know on my post on site I spoke to Ivan and Ivan shared his you know all hands deck from back then when I asked him about what is the company vision and he’s just walked me through all the slides and I was like this I was the CEO of the company I have not even accepted the offer forget like me joining as an employee and he’s sharing with me internal company material this is like next level I’ve never seen this level of transparency and it was just you mind-b blown with that and that led me to signing and till date I am in post on site with Ivan and he he literally does that it’s the most recent all hands because you know the vision has been evolving and you know we have most recent content but he still shares that with candidates and I find that phenomenal that we have this level of transparency and this is seen through a lot of like our you know company all hands and stuff where in the past I’ve attended company all hands and people ask questions and usually from execs you get like very like professional answers that don’t really even answer the question and it’s not a good experience being in the audience cuz you didn’t get any meat out of it but over here I always feel like you know I get I get the real real truth out which which to me is very important and then outside of the people outside of that I would say just the people here are amazing like I feel they are here to help each other we are here to make sure notion succeeds but at the same time not at the cost of each other’s professional development like I’ve worked in past companies where you know your co-workers are competing with you and it’s almost like a you know competition unsaid competition and that’s not a fun place to be right versus over here everybody is like looking out for each other and helping the other one grow which which makes it like truly collaborative and fun to be when you don’t you don’t have to worry about you know what is this other person’s goal and what are they really trying to do couldn’t agree more.

My main things were the people and the growth and exactly the transparency for when I was interviewing two three years later why I’m still here and I love it here. So, love hearing that. It’s honestly just very mutual across the board.

And then a question I am here it is. And I think this would be a great question for you Moini, but how does a company support continuous learning and development for their employees? Specifically in software engineering.

So whether it be from early career all the way to senior or even just like junior or midcareer all the way to senior whatever that’s looked like for you. Yeah. This really depends upon sorry my voice was like going back but yeah this really depends on where you are in your career where you are in your team.

Especially for like early career people, I usually recommend them that you know they dedicate some hours of their week to make sure they’re learning new things. And then depending on the person like this can be an hour daily, this can be like an afternoon block on a Monday or a Friday. So different people set it up different ways, but we I and this is encouraged, right?

This is not like you have to, but we usually encourage people to spend the time to make sure you’re you’re keeping up with the technological side. The other thing is for senior people, usually we recommend a 80/20 split where we say, you know, spend 80% of your time in more the execution and things that the team is currently working on and you’re responsible for, but spend 20% of your time on future facing stuff. And future facing could be, you know, learning for some people.

It could be coming up with a proposal for something as a team we should be doing next. So it it can vary again depending on the person. So that 8020 split usually works very well for people.

And then as a company we also have an L & D week which is the whole company we have a lot of like L & D sessions targeted for you know different angles where we encourage people to sign up and make sure that you know they’re investing in their own learning and growth. So personally you know I feel that that’s a big week for the company because you know everybody is focused on you know just growing and learning. And there’s so much like good programming that is set up like so many good sessions that you could be attending and really all you need to do is attend.

All the programming has already been done. You don’t need to research anything yourself. You just have to like show up and you know you take so much knowledge out of it.

Amazing. Thank you so much. I also couldn’t agree more.

I think with the L & D opportunities and especially with like craft and values week is what we call it, what Mojit was referring to. It’s kind of like a companywide effort to make sure you still spend that time and invest in it year-over-year on just things that you want to maybe get more experience in or skill sets that you may not have that are being offered. So that is awesome.

A general question which I think this is a really good question. How do you respond to competition in your niche? And this one specifically references exiles, but of course there are so many other ones.

So would love to hear maybe both of your thoughts. Maybe Chris from a recruiter perspective and when you’re taking calls and kind of moving down the process and then Moini from a just like a as a working engineer and like leader perspective when you’re considering oh these other kind of companies are doing what we’re doing as well. Oh, Shiovani is Xiles a competitor?

I haven’t heard of them before. I also have not heard of them before, but this is what referencing. So, that’s why I said generally maybe even just like other competition in our niche.

Yeah. And this is just notion as a product overall. I think so.

Yeah. Or maybe even like substance of our products because we have so many things within notion as well now. Yeah, of course.

And this is just a recruit perspective so I pro I can be probably a little bit wrong here. When I first joined notion we were like 250ish employees and I felt like a lot of the use cases what what we were trying to build back then it seemed like was really focused on note-taking documentation and our wiki use case being companies like internal knowledge base and then we’re kind of diving into project management at that time and it felt like a lot of things that we were trying to work on specifically were some of the things that we felt like maybe the bigger companies like Google and Microsoft you know weren’t weren’t doing well at least as well as we thought they that that they could do or didn’t have all the features built out that notion is building and those are kind of like the use cases notion that that was focused on and and now it feels a little bit different. It feels like you know now that we’re large a slightly larger company that you know we want to challenge those bigger competitors and you know build things in in ways that we think are better for a multitude of different use cases not just the ones that notion’s been good at today.

So that’s been pretty interesting like how do we how do we go against competition? It just feels like a couple years ago we were, you know, we tried to stay away from some of like the bigger competition and now it doesn’t feel like that so much where we want to take them head on. Which is definitely like a a change in, you know, just like not so much notions culture but maybe slightly like the mindset which is pretty interesting as a as a recruiter perspective.

I haven’t heard of XTiles but there’s obviously smaller competitors like Linear for example or Monday.com sometimes we see them. The you know we’re all slightly different companies. If you brought Notion to one of those competitors, there’s probably features that they build that are better than ours.

And if you look at Notion’s features, there’s probably features that we build that’s better than ours. I think Notion’s one of our one of our one of the main things I think Notion really wins at is, you know, we we are a free product, right? A lot of students have us for free.

We’re able to build like a moat of users through that and through that funnel, right? Maybe you use Notion personally or at school you really love the product and then you buy a consumer account, right? Personal per personal account or maybe after you leave school you create your own company to start right with two friends and the first product that you think of to use for your specific use cases like project management and task is notion because you’ve been using it for the last couple years that’s one like no that’s like a has been a big point of notion notion selling point has been you know being the product productivity tool for the small to mediumsiz business specifically so two or three employees to two or 300 or two or 300 to two or three thousand money’s kind of talked about already but you know we want to get to the point where not notion is seen as you know the productivity tool for the enterprise space and become more mature and stuff like that so those are things that we’re working on again not a perfect answer if you come across competitors of notion they probably do things better than us in some ways and if you think of notion we do better things than them in some ways as well thank you so much and moin to you yeah to me competition is actually good competition is how you know any company stays on their toes and you know continues to innovate right I had also not heard about exiles until here but then I I just Googled it up and it’s it’s good to learn about them but yeah the the way I see competition is definitely more from like you know what are what are the things they’re doing better than us why are they catching traction are there things we can bring bring into our product that can add the same value to our users users, right?

So, it’s more like, you know, it encourages more creativity, it encourages more innovation, which is which is good for the industry overall. Yeah. Awesome.

Thank you so much. And then I’m there’s so many questions. Again, thank you so much for asking them all and we’re so sorry if we can’t get to them all by the end of our time here, which I think we have about five more minutes.

But the next question that I’m seeing is could you and I think Moini maybe this is a question for you. Could you tell us about the massive refacto refactor over the past few years that’s allowed you to push all of these new features recently? Yeah.

So one of the big things we did recently was rewriting our mobile app. And rewriting a lot of parts of it to be in native code. Previously it was just mostly you know mobile view for web code and this was one of the reasons we did this was you know performance as I was talking about it was a downside that we were seeing with not having native code and we were like you know mobile app is feeling really slow and this is not great for our users we’re getting a lot of complaints and so we we took on this and what this helped us was you know our timings really improved and we saw a lot of like performance improvements, but really with the performance, the whole user experience and engagement improved.

Like we even saw like our app store ratings improved for the mobile app because now people are not like I I’m not constantly just seeing a spinner in the mobile app, right? Like I things are actually loading and I can do my work. So to me this one really stands out because it it had multiffold effect.

It improved performance which was our goal. It improved the user experience as a side effect which was great. And then we didn’t even expect the mobile app ratings to improve as a part of this refactor and that happened too which was which was like you know cherry on the cake.

Awesome. Thank you so much. I am refreshing these votes.

I’m going to start going from the top down again to the non-answered one. But I believe a question came in which I think was answered but thank you for answering your previous question. What would you recommend for an international student in order to stand out in terms of soft skills and technical skills?

It’s the same I would say in terms of what we have been saying projects things that you’ve been a part of whether it be organizations coursework that you’ve taken your school your internships. Personally for me, when I’m reading through your resumes and I’m looking at your past internships, I really look for what type of work were you doing? What was the impact of the work that you did?

If you had endto-end ownership, were you given a problem statement and you ran with it? You wrote up a RFC text, you implemented everything, you pushed it. Honestly, yes.

It’s hard to fit all of that on one page, but for me personally, the more detail the better. And if not, at least putting that impact on there just so we have a better understanding of what were you able to accomplish during your 12 or 16 weeks during the internship. But Mags, anything else to add to that?

What would make you stand out stand out? If you think about not just notion for any position that you’re applying for, there’s going to be a lot of résumés that you’re going to be going not going against, but whoever’s looking at rums, they’re going to see a lot of them. I think the main thing is like you need to present your resume in a way that anyone that’s looking at it is able to decipher what you’re trying to to say specifically.

You know, is the resume that you applied to Facebook, maybe a recruiter that is not familiar with the type of companies you worked at is going to look at it. Maybe they’re not very, you know, technically sound in that way. How do you present it in like a concise, clear way that anyone can understand that?

That is like really important in my opinion because you need to be able to your resume needs to be it needs to be able to be be presented to anyone that’s able to like look at that resume because it could be an energy manager, could be a software engineer, could be a recruiter, could be someone outside of that, right? You need to be prepared for that. If you have any friends or, you know, individuals from the same school as you that are at larger companies, you know, look at their resumes like what what did what’s on their resume that yours doesn’t have?

Is it the format? Is it specific wording? How they paraphrase things.

Like just getting feedback on those things can be super useful. That’s what I was doing when I was applying. I wanted to I was reaching out to my my my friends who were also applying in similar roles and I was like, "Okay, like this is what I have on my resume.

This is what they have on theirs." Like see differences there. Differences are perfectly fine as well, though. Again, like what’s going to make you stand out?

It’s it’s really hard to stand out completely. But a lot of things that I’ve already talked about in terms of classes, in terms of personal projects, in terms of internships, if you’re missing any of those, that’s perfectly fine. And you just want to be able to spike in other areas.

Maybe you don’t have internships listed, but you have very good details about some challenging things that you’ve built built on the personal side. Like that’s really good. Maybe you don’t have any personal projects because you’ve been so busy at your current internship there.

That’s perfectly fine. Just make sure you list all the things you’ve accomplished in the internship with like the actual impact. That type of stuff is very useful.

Like those are the areas that going to make you spike compared to other resumes that whoever is looking at your resume is going to see. Awesome. Thank you so much.

For also just providing more information there. And then I’m going to end on our final question just because we are at time but Max and Heene would love to understand how do you use notion in your day-to-day and maybe that’s at work because we do use notion internally and we use it for everything or externally if you do use it. I can go first.

So before I joined notion I was using it to track my spending habits. I was spending too much money and then my workout routine because I was trying to get back in the gym and then my eating habits because I was trying to eat healthier. So I was trying to be more productive and just life overall.

And at that point I was also using it in my previous company which is why I applied to notion. So I was using it for like those three main things and also I was building out our training because my last company moved from Confluence into notion. So I was using it in that regard professionally too.

That is pretty much how I use notion today still in my personal life. Those like three main areas. So that’s why you know I love notion as a product.

Off to you Moini. I think like I literally live and breathe in notion work-wise like if there are two or three apps that I use a lot in the day is definitely Zoom especially on the non- anchor days like you know for all the meetings Slack for all the back and forth and then notion right like all the documentation like our we I have a one-on-one doc for every meeting we’re taking notes but you know product docs tech specs like literally all the communication this is where all the knowledge is and this is where we’re going back and forth on things. So literally live and breathe in notion.

Outside of that in my personal life I use it for my task tracking a lot. You know what do I need to do every day versus weekends. I think mostly like you know every day with work it’s very hard to make progress on some of the tasks but on weekends task tracking also say like usually like trip planning when we have especially international trips coming up like making the itineraries and tracking photos and things to do that that happens in notion as well and usually as a journal as well like if I’ve done research on something and then I know I would probably want to get back to this in a year or two.

I just try to document and you know keep everything in notion so I can get back to it easily and you know I don’t need to start from zero again. Awesome. Thank you so much and thank you everyone for joining us.

I am gonna I believe pass it back over to Daniel. Awesome. Awesome.

And with that we have sadly reached the end of our time in this session. I’d really love to extend a huge huge huge thank you to the notion team. Everybody throw an emoji party for them to show your appreciation and send them a thank you note in the chat.

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