They do exist. (I picked one of my own answers since it was easy to find)
Career advice made loads of sense when we were "Not Programming Related". It continued to make some vague kind of gibbering sense thereafter...right up until The Workplace became established to take care of the general cases. We still occasionally see a specialized case that's both "programmery" enough for us and at the same time general enough to be of future use to the community and those googling for it.
Fundamentally that's why it's a problematic thing. What are the odds that someone will find one of our "good" career questions via a search engine (even our own) and not just ask yet another extremely localized, poorly articulated, and/or hugely broad career development question? Pretty highly tilted toward the "lousy" end of the spectrum from where I sit.
Given that The Workplace is going to launch soon, they have the metal to stand on their own. That said, they are also not our toilet bowl. (For future reference, trying to use Software Recommendations as the next dumping ground for a rather similar kind of question asked in the same vague terms will be met with scrutiny).
So the question is, how do we as experienced, professional programmers (for various modes of experienced and professional) deal with our future peers coming to us for advice on how to proceed? Chat is great but that 20 rep is both a gift and a curse. We can't hoist everyone who asks a career related question into chat, that'd make the lower bound for chat participation pointless. So here's what I propose:
Write out a comprehensive guide to becoming a professional programmer. Several of these exist already: (Thanks for finding it, @MichaelT IIRC) Joel on Software, Coding Horror, Scott Hanselman, innumerable books, podcasts, the list goes on. What I propose is a good heuristic for reading all this stuff.
Bad career questions (of which the vast majority are) tend to boil down to "Decide this for me". The economy is a big, howling tumblebeast of a thing and that's scary to people with no work experience and little of idea of a career trajectory and precious little reliably good advice from the academics they have access to. So they want a sure thing. Java or C# or C++ or whatever. Nothing has ever been a sure bet outside of intelligently honed skill and thoughtful, polite gall.
Obviously what I propose is a bunch of work but it's got to be better than continuing to keep relentlessly closing these questions with no other options.
Be much more precise about what we mean by "Career advice" and similar topics. And I mean be really precise. Where the hell is the line? We need to very precisely define it. I'd use first example I gave as a decent starting point. It's clearly applicable to all programmers generally and stands a decent chance of staying relevant (particularly as universities kill off CS departments) Here's another from the old, old days that's still alive.
Make sure we know exactly what is on-topic on the Workplace and Freelancing before we even try to suggest migrating things there. Explain the difference between off-topic for this site and off-topic for the network at large. Most career questions fall into the latter but some are only in the former. We need to be clear as to exactly why these aren't good questions for this site or this network as appropriate. "This won't appeal to future visitors of the site" and "This narrowly applies only to you" need to enumerated somewhat I think. It's obvious to us but to many who are not familiar with how the network operates or what it's goals are (concise, accurate, timeless googleable content), the words we use seem very arbitrary and obtuse. There's a particular flavor of newbie argument that goes "But someday it might be useful to someone!" seems valid but isn't. It goes against the idea that we are a concise source of information with singular, authoritative monoliths enscribbled with the writings of the mad geniuses of the ages rather than the cleaved fieldstone of such monoliths, forcing much searching and anguish for no gain.
Edit the hell out of the Career Development tag to serve as the gateway to as much of this as we can might be a good option in corollary to item 1.
I think career advice does have a place here. It's a small place, but a place nonetheless. It just needs to be very, very clearly defined as to the what, hows and whys of the particular advice we are willing to give.