We discussed merging career and jobs, but now it's time to put a plan into action. Aaronut's plan is great, but we need some help from the posse:
Step 1: Clean up the tags
There are currently several job-related tags that need people to go through and flag or vote to close questions that are no longer (or were never) on-topic:
- Jobs: jobs, job-market, new-job, job-definition, job-title, job-hunting, job-satisfaction, job-distance, job-retention, hpc-jobs, scientific-computing-jobs
- Career: career
- Employment: employment, employer, employers, self-employment
- Business: business, business-process, business-logic, business-rules, business-analysis, business-it
- Other: interview, hiring, project-management, teamwork
Guidelines:
- When you're done cleaning up a tag, post an answer here that you've finished so others know to prioritize other tags.
- When in doubt about a question, create a new question here on meta instead of flagging so the community can decide if a question is a keeper.
- Start with the oldest questions first: our really old questions have a high likelihood of no longer meeting the site's guidelines, and are what are in most need of cleanup. We have plenty of time to deal with the newer stuff.
Step 2: Reorganize the survivors
We need to have a set of workable tags and tag synonyms, and any question that survived the purging needs to be edited to include those tags and improved in any way possible. Aaronut's guidelines are pretty good, so let's go with them:
- career-development for questions that are about developing your career as a programmer.
- job-market for questions about the prospects of getting a new job.
- job-satisfaction for questions about work/life balance, creating better workspaces, etc.
- job-advancement and also teamwork for questions about excelling in one's current position.
- project-management and/or employee-relations and/or business for employer-focused questions.
Guidelines:
- If you have to deviate from the list above, favor tag suffixes: the system allows us to use wildcards in tag preferences, so jobs-foo is preferable to foo-jobs.
- Spread out the organization. Every time you edit a long-dead question to retag it, it bumps it back to the front page. Retagging 20+ questions at the same time kills the front-page usability for the rest of the visitors.
- Start with the oldest questions first. Our really old questions have a high likelihood of no longer meeting the site's guidelines, and are what are in most need of cleanup. We have plenty of time to deal with the newer stuff.
- Request tag synonyms by creating a question here on meta. This is especially important when a tag is organized out of existence (i.e. all the questions that had a tag have had that tag removed in favor of something else).
- Don't bump questions you don't intend to see reopened. This is going to be disruptive without bumping a ton of questions that don't belong here anyway. If you can save a question by substantially editing it, by all means do that, but if a question is just bad and already closed, at most just flag it for deletion.
Step 3: Burnination
Once all the good questions have been properly organized, we can go through the normal clean-up process of deleting old, off-topic stuff.
