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A question was asked today that was a rant followed by a request for career advice on what the OP should do next. @Oded handled commenting to the OP that such questions were off-topic according to the FAQ and the OP justified the question

since I can use the tag and .

After a quick scan of both tags ( and ) I found that the majority of both contain closed questions and another fair amount that can be retagged.

Is there value in having these two tags if the FAQ clearly states that the site is not about career advice, salary or compensation???

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    I think [career-development] does serve a purpose, and it's one of my favorite tags to browse on the site. Career advice isn't the same as career development. We can't advise someone on what career path they should take, but we can answer some questions about career development for software developers. I'm not sure about [career-transition] though... I can't think of any cases where it could be on-topic here.
    – Rachel
    Commented Jan 6, 2013 at 18:30
  • after (if:) Workplace comes out of beta, I'd prefer to get rid of these tags (maybe "lock" somehow to preserve older, pre-Workplace questions)
    – gnat
    Commented Jan 7, 2013 at 20:15

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I agree with @Rachel in her comment to the question. Career development and career advice are different things.

Career advice question seek help in a particular, narrowly-scoped situation. An answer to such question is not going to help many people. I clearly see that this website is not a place for such questions, unlike Workplace.SE is and probably will be.

On the other hand, [career-development] questions seek general answers on how programmers careers might evolve, what stages of it one might encounter, when to learn theory and when to apply it with different technologies, what experience-based general advices people might have to those who just got out of the college.

I think we should more clearly define what [career-development] tag means and make it clear to the community so that unwanted questions do not take place in the future.

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  • This is all good, but irrelevant if the tags aren't used as they are supposed to be used. If a lot of people use [career-development] to ask career advice questions, then the tag is problematic and should probably go away. The two topics are distinct, but their differences are subtle, and become even more subtle if we consider non native English speakers.
    – yannis Mod
    Commented Jan 19, 2013 at 22:19
  • We could rename [career-development] to be more clear. Say, [programmer-development] or [professional-growth].
    – hellodanylo
    Commented Jan 20, 2013 at 7:40

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