Michael Calore: OK, so they said, “Yes.”
Lauren Goode: They, said, “Yes.”
Michael Calore: “You can come in-“
Lauren Goode: “And vibe code with us.”
Michael Calore: So you went there in July?
Lauren Goode: I did.
Michael Calore: What’s Notion as a company, as a workplace, new employee, Lauren Goode?
Lauren Goode: There’s this feeling, I know, and I don’t have to worry about getting fired either, so I can really say whatever I want. There’s this feeling of walking into Notion that feels a little bit like you’re in this 2010s time portal of startups. They’re in a really nice building downtown. There’s a jazz club downstairs. They have a well stocked kitchen, they get lunch delivered every day, there’s a Bevi machine. Have you heard of Bevi?
Michael Calore: It’s like capital, B-E-V-I?
Lauren Goode: That is correct.
Michael Calore: And it’s like mixed sodas, right?
Lauren Goode: Yeah, mixed sodas, yeah. Someone actually coded a little app internally to check which syrups are available for the sodas. It seems like a fairly symbiotic workforce. And they had a desk waiting for me with a tote bag, and stickers, and a welcome note. I had done a little bit of onboarding beforehand, and because they were not going to set me up on my laptop in their IDE, their internal coding tool.
Michael Calore: Smart.
Lauren Goode: They set me up. I was pair programming, so I was paired up with engineers who knew what they were doing.
Michael Calore: What was the first project that you worked on?
Lauren Goode: I worked on something called a Mermaid diagram. It’s like basically a type of flow chart that exists within Notion and exists in general. And when you make something in an app and then you want to expand it or zoom into it to look at it more closely, the files that were being generated as Mermaid charts in Notion were static. They were static SVG files and so you couldn’t expand them, and it was very annoying for users because they can’t actually read the little text that’s within this chart.
Read the full article here