How will making political posts on LinkedIn affect your career?
I am seeing many people making posts about Gaza or Israel on LinkedIn. American politics are becoming extremely polarized and many people feel a responsibility to speak out for what they believe. Gaza and Israel is the main example right now, but there are others. I also saw this trend when SCOTUS overturned Roe Vs Wade.
I might be seeing only a small percentage of people on LinkedIn but many high level engineers, managers and others at top companies are bringing politics into LinkedIn.
To be clear, I am not trying to make Taro a place for politic debate.
There probably is not any right answer to this, but I would like to hear opinions.
Thanks
Discussion
(5 comments)- 52 months agoTech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
I'd stay away from political posts. Not only is it unhelpful in your career, but it's also ineffective at changing minds.
People don't come to LinkedIn for political content or commentary, so your posts would be ignored, or worse yet, they'll be viewed negatively.
LinkedIn in intended to be a "professional profile," so one way to look at this is around how comfortable you would be to share the viewpoint in the workplace.
There's a broader trend in the industry of focusing on the company mission and ignoring all the noise. I think this separation is healthy.
- I may have passionate political viewpoints outside of work, but I don't want that to infiltrate into the work environment.
- I also don't want to be subjected to other people's political beliefs at work, if it's not directly related to my day job.
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2 months agoThoughtful TarodactylTaro CommunityIn a related question, what are your thoughts on posting jokes or memes on LinkedIn and Youtube? These could be shared at work, could bring people together with humor, yet online it's harder to recover if it's interpreted differently by someone.
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2 months agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroI'm a big fan of jokes or memes, and I don't think they're inherently worse than other forms of online content when it comes to potential misinterpretation downsides.
Humor is quite universal. There are lots of YouTube channels and LinkedIn accounts that do incredibly well mostly sharing memes in particular. A lot of LinkedIn "influencers" regularly steal memes from Reddit lol (and a lot memes on Reddit are stolen too, so it's just the circle of internet content life).
- 52 months agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
I'm very politically engaged, but one of my hard rules for posting on LinkedIn is to not get overtly political. It could definitely be used against you in a hiring loop. And as Rahul mentioned, people don't go to LinkedIn to read takes on issues like abortion, so it's best for your engagement on the platform as well. In this polarized day and age, people are so sick and tired of politics and I try to respect that.
The most "political" I'll get is arguing for workers' rights. That issue is political (pro-labor vs. pro-corporation), but it fits very well within the realm of LinkedIn as LinkedIn is mostly IC-workers. My entire goal behind building Taro is to empower engineers to lead both high-growth and happy careers, so this is a theme I'll continue weaving into my posts as I talk about things like layoffs, work-life balance, and supporting more junior engineers (instead of just throwing them in the deep-end like many companies do).
- 12 months agoSoftware Engineer @ Wikimedia Foundation
Although this question is on posting on LI and our reputation, it immediately reminded me of Coinbase’s stance on politics (consider me/this a “drive-by” comment lol), https://www.coinbase.com/blog/coinbase-is-a-mission-focused-company. I heard the CEO, Brian Armstrong talk about this in greater depth on a podcast a couple of years ago (I can’t remember which one) and I really admired what he had to say.
