In the first part of what will assuredly be a several part series on tag cleanups, I'd like to discuss merging jobs into career.
Both tags generally are about jobs: working at a job, career development, getting a job, etc.
Is there a reason we need to keep these tags separate?
This seems to have been proposed a long time ago but never followed through on. This is what happens when you let them fester...
Anyway, to me there are actually several different subcategories of career questions, almost none of which are properly represented by the current tags:
Career development means advancing one's career, irrespective of their current job. In other words, topics such as becoming a more attractive/in-demand employee or candidate, advancing up the ranks, or developing interviewing or negotiating skills. Some well-defined CD questions are:
Career advice is essentially an umbrella term for aimless "help me, I fail at life" questions which should be terminated with extreme prejudice. Right now, these tend to share the career tag.
Then there are job rants, which I personally don't even think deserve the dignity of being closed (as opposed to flat-out deleted). The hallmark of these topics is that the essential question - if there actually is one - is almost always some variant of "should I quit?":
Several questions exist about finding and acquiring jobs. These are similar, on the surface, to career development questions, but tend to be at the tactical rather than strategic level:
There are also some (admittedly few) from the employer or management side, many of which are legitimately tagged project-management and don't deserve to be saddled with career:
Finally there are several - far too many, actually, including a ridiculous number of "talking to management" questions - that I would classify as managing one's own job:
To me, this is not just a simple matter of merging a tag. The jobs tag itself is very unfocused and contains a lot of questions about job searching, job management, and I think a few about hiring. Merging it with the career tag will only create more chaos in that tag.
I'd like to suggest dispensing entirely with both the career and jobs tags and propose the following new categories (of course, this is just a suggestion):
This is the type of thing that's only going to be solved by a long, arduous process of community-supported hand-sorting. Fortunately, I think this site has enough daily activity to support some bulk manual retagging.
Alternatively, go ahead and merge it all into career but then put the career tag on notice saying that it needs to be phased out and sorted into subcategories.
No reason I know of. Lots of closed questions in both. I would support merging them.
I would support eliminating both tags since very few seem to not get closed.
