I've expounded on locked questions before and mentioned that these often age poorly. If something is to be locked, especially today, it should have some amount of moderation and curation done. These are things that we should be putting in museums as questions that can produce good quality and we should aspire to ("see, look, we can have good material on very soft questions if people act to moderate and keep the quality up") rather than things we want to lock away and forget.
To this, I really have to ask about why Why should developers have private offices? was locked.
The question had 4 delete votes on it (6 needed total for it based on votes and popularity). It was locked. And... well... if it is something that we should be keeping around (I don't believe so - that's why one of those delete votes is mine), before it is locked it should be evaluated for:
- Poor quality and negatively scored posts should be deleted.
- Too chatty / not constructive comments should be deleted.
- Tags that are part of a burnination process should be removed
What really gets me here is that this question really is just a poll with one answer that is reasonable (but doesn't answer the poll question) and 23 answers that are "I've got an office" or "I have an open plan."
I feel that this type of question - old polls - really doesn't age well and isn't indicative of what good quality on the site should be. It is exactly the watercooler conversation type thing and getting to know you that the six subjective guidelines were put in place to prevent. That it hasn't been seen much and there are no in bound links from other questions on Programmers.SE suggests that it really isn't that valuable of a post.
This type of question is the type of thing that a Slashdot poll (for example do you need to wear headphones while working) does better than a Q&A format site.
As I cannot flag the post (its locked), and this question wouldn't fit into a flag text, please either:
- Unlock the post so that it may continue with the normal lifecycle of a post
or
- Delete all poor quality material (I believe this would be 'all posts other than the accepted answer' - or first and third if you stretch it a bit), remove the burnination tags (jobs and job-title are both in the current round), and rework the body of the question so that it isn't a poll and is answered exactly by the accepted answer.