Career Choices, Motivated Reasoning, and Thinking by Proxy [Part 1]

Background

Last year, I seriously struggled to find an internship for the summer – as is fairly evident in the number of rejections I’ve received. There were three main categories of jobs that I was looking into – product management (PM), data science, and consulting – and the latter wasn’t an option (due to my delayed graduation date in 2021). So, data science and PM it was, and so began the odyssey that would become 99 straight rejections and ghostings. Recruiting that year influenced my views about whether I was technical/smart enough for a job in product management, if I was qualified, if I was a good fit. Thankfully, applications #100 and #101 turned into my “data science” internship at Popspots and a product management part-time gig at a friend’s technology-consulting firm.

With that, I entered this year deciding that I’d recruit for product management and consulting. I applied for about a dozen jobs on the technology side of things, and I went to the CS career fair to scope out options. That in and of itself was a pretty terrible experience – most of the companies there weren’t hiring yet for PM; those that were didn’t really seem very interested in a kid with a business degree. I received one coding challenge after all was said and done, but talked to enough companies to make out with a haul of eight shirts, two decks of playing cards, an umbrella, and a journal for writing in. On the consulting side of things, I ended up applying to the usual big three firms (BCG, McKinsey, and Bain) and Oliver Wyman – OW didn’t give me an interview, and McKinsey rejected me before things ended.

Thankfully, things went well with BCG. I got a call saying that I got the offer, and within thirty minutes of that I received a rejection from Google for a PM role (before the interview rounds). Given how things went in the past, I felt a couple of things in that 60-minute span:

Hell yeah, I just got an offer from BCG.
Man, fuck these PM jobs. I don’t want more rejections; I’m just going to sign with a consulting firm.

And that’s the story of how I signed my job offer within an hour of receiving it on paper – and something didn’t sit completely right with me about that. For one, my background is supposed to be perfect for PM. I have both the engineering and business skillsets; I have friends telling me that I’d do a great job at it and that it’s a great fit for me. The speed of my commitment to avoid further pain from rejection, combined with the discrepancy between how good I think I’d be at PM and how good companies apparently think I’d be at PM has made me think non-stop about if I made the right choice and if I need to re-assess how I make choices.

Ignorance Actually is Bliss

To be clear, if my goal was to be content, what I’m doing isn’t helping. If I purely wanted to maximize satisfaction, then I wouldn’t have thought about my career choices at all – I would have patted myself on the back for signing with a firm that is aspirational for many business undergraduates. Indeed, time spent wondering if I made the right decision is time I could spend instead thinking about how I can live a more sustainable lifestyle, or when I’ll see my family next, or how I can basically pound Natural Lights at the local bar every Tuesday as long as I don’t seriously flunk my classes.

For most decisions I make, I don’t need to revisit them, because there’s nothing that important at stake. The fact that I shop at Trader Joe’s and eat chicken fried rice about five times a week isn’t something that I deemed important. My choice of credit cards isn’t something I deemed important enough to contemplate about. Hell, I don’t even contemplate about my choice to come to UT anymore (though there’s a difference in that I could still change what I do in the future and I can’t really change where I get my undergraduate degrees from anymore).

This decision is something I’ve thought about, though, for a two main reasons:

I’m not locked-in to what I do when I graduate. While I’m committed to an internship, I could still theoretically choose to recruit for product management after I graduate.
This topic has material importance to my life; if I’m going to spend ~80 hours a week at my job, I better make 100% sure that it’s the right choice.

Avoiding Motivated Reasoning

Tim Urban, the author behind Wait But Why, made a great post on motivated reasoning (MR) and what he calls “the Thinking Ladder”. It’s super long, but super insightful, and you should read it. TL;DR, motivated reasoning is when you think like a sports fan, actively seeking out information to strengthen your existing beliefs without really trying to see what position the other side has.

My goal in thinking about if I made the right decision or not was to avoid MR – and this is especially hard to do for several reasons:

When you’re in the interview and the company asks you why you want to work for that company/why you want to do that role/why you want to be in that city, you’re stating, out loud, to another person what you want and some of the reasons you want it. People want to be consistent, and saying things out loud is one of the things we can do to make us want to follow through on something. So every time you tell an interviewer why you want the job, you’re only mentally strengthening this notion that this is actually the job you want (and making a potential subsequent rejection slightly more painful).
Once you’ve committed to signing an offer letter with a firm, there’s no going back (within an ethical framework). Any doubts you create about if you made the right decision or not are negative, especially since you’re already locked into the decision. There’s no doubt to creating regret about a decision that’s unable to be changed that you still have to live with.
Once you’ve told other people about your decision, you’re mostly just going to hear things along the lines of “Congratulations!” and “That’s awesome!” and “Good for you!” We surround ourselves with people who wish us the best (which, to be clear, is a good thing), but most of what we’ll hear is how we’ve worked hard to earn this, or that we deserve this, or that it’s a great fit for us, etc.

In this context, MR looks like “yeah, I definitely made the right call. I’m a much better fit for a consulting career than product management; here’s why PM is bad and here’s why consulting is good”. MR is how we operate on autopilot, which means that it’s something that you have to actively put effort into avoiding.

I think I’ll call it here for Part 1. Part 2 will address the tools I used to fight MR, along with some insight into my actual thought process.