I was surprised to see that the top five questions on programmers.SE this morning were closed as off topic. As is often the case, they were all career development questions.
Since there seems to be a demand for these types of questions, should we perhaps be moving them to a career development stackexchange (if one exists)?
These questions are being cleaned up as part of the structured tag cleanup that's going on at the moment.
This means that there will be times when the home page has old, closed questions on it as we remove the offending tag - in this case "careers".
In general old questions are not migrated to new sites - either to seed the site or once they've settled on their final scope. This is because these questions skew the reputation of participants - they've had longer to exist than questions on the new site and thus tend to have more votes. We found out this to our cost when old questions were migrated from Stack Overflow to us.
It appears that these closures were part of the Structured Tag Clean-Up Initiative for the careers tag, so this was coming. The short story is that having a career tag invited a number of off-topic questions, so it was decided to go through and remove the tag and evaluate all of the questions to make sure it was appropriate.
At this time, there is no general purpose career Stack Exchange site. The closest thing is The Workpace, which is still in the committal phase. It's about 70% to completion at this point. However, the general practice is to not move questions until the site is out of beta (or at least it is well-established as to what is on-topic and what is off-topic on the other site). In addition, older questions or non-constructive questions are never moved (first rule of migrations: never migrate crap). There's a more detailed discussion of this concern here, in another Meta question.
So, at this time, all career questions that apply to all careers and do not require the specific expertise of professional software developers will be closed because they are off-topic here. If you feel that you can salvage one through the use of heroic edits to make it constructive and on-topic, please do so and try to get it reopened (including using chat, Meta, and moderator flags as appropriate).
