career was recently cleaned up, through the Structured Tag Cleanup Initiative.
It's a rather troublesome tag that we've been trying to get rid of for quite some time:
Previous attempts to clean up the tag:
Can we please kill it now?
2 Answers
Not sure if this would be a good idea.
I am convinced that the majority of programmers are more concerned and/or clueless about career direction and general workplace issues than discussions of design, algorithms, and programming.
If you blacklist the tag they are just going to post the same question with dvcs or software-engineering or something else that is entirely inappropriate. Then we have a real problem on our hands that we can no longer group these problem questions together by a simple tag search anymore.
Perhaps a better idea would be to leave it open as a strategic honeypot where we can quickly and easily pick off these questions before they get upvoted 2000 times and get 68 answers all along the lines of, "Ya my boss totally sucks too!" or "You should learn PHP because Java sucks".
UPDATE:
I am not convinced that a career tag will mislead users. The order in which a question is asked is:
Title (about 1 minute)
Question (about 5-25 minutes)
Tags "Huh? What is this Tags for? It says I need to add one before asking my question. I can't find a career tag anywhere so lets just put algorithms. I took all the time writing this question and there isn't any other official SE site yet for software development career questions so hopefully this will go through."
Tags are an afterthought for most users because intelligently picking an appropriate tag requires even the slightest modicum of effort and research on their part. These users are a constant. No amount of education or hand holding will make them a productive member of this site who understands or cares what we are about.
Would you rather they just start posting terrible questions in random tags? I predict that is what will happen if you start blacklisting these tags.
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1I don't like having a tag around whose sole purpose is to identify close worthy questions. Although I can definitely see the value in quickly weeding out the crap, I'd prefer not to mislead people that it's ok to ask career related questions on Programmers. People will keep asking off topic questions, either because they failed to read our FAQ (a problem we can't solve) or because they failed to understand it (a problem we can solve through Meta).– yannisMar 9, 2012 at 13:17
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1software-engineering will also be blacklisted as well. Having on less method of confusing users as to what is on-topic/off-topic is better, and since general career advice is off-topic, let's not present them with a career tag.– Thomas Owens ModMar 9, 2012 at 13:28
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2Blacklisting tags does work to deter people from using tags that don't make any sense on a site. Otherwise there are people who'd tag things with [programming] on Stack Overflow and [software] on Super User. We do have a [career-development] tag here, so if someone is intent on posting career-related questions, they will likely just use that instead of defaulting to some other random tag. Mar 9, 2012 at 14:07
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@AnnaLear Well I gave my opinion and I respect yours. The next time there is an STCI I won't be the one writing the query.– maple_shaft ModMar 9, 2012 at 14:18
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2@YannisRizos Very good! I feel the urge to close things, this works out well ;)– maple_shaft ModMar 9, 2012 at 14:24
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I had my doubts about if this is a good idea or not too, but I think I'm OK with it because if someone types in
career, thencareer-developmentpops up which will hopefully lead to them to realizing that questions about careers should be about career-development to be on-topic– RachelMar 10, 2012 at 15:26
career-development. I originally objected to this idea until I understood that.