Careers needs its own meta/dedicated support system

Question

Two years ago, the possibility of careers having its own meta was raised. The question didn't get much interest, but the accepted reasons to not have a separate careers meta essentially boiled down to "careers is a little side-project, and meta.SO is a catchall for support."

Careers is definitely not small these days. There are currently 935 careers questions here on Meta.SO. For comparison, answers (!) has 1024, and meta.Programmers.SE has 1027 total. There are twice as many careers questions as retag-requests (461) and I'm sure everyone can appreciate how common those are.

Careers also strikes me as a very different beast than many other SO side-projects. Apart from its size, it's designed to be exclusive. There are apparently 52k users on careers, versus twice that many active users on SO. Why should over half the StackExchange community see meta discussion of something they're excluded from?

Apart from the exclusivity, Careers also doesn't feel directly related to the broad SE goal of building a good storehouse of Q&A knowledge. Careers helps match potential employees and employers, but that's a very immediate benefit. A question on SE today might help someone years from now.

TL;DR: Careers is a fine and worthy project, but it's distinct from StackExchange and should have distinct support.

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Edit:
I see from comments that there's some confusion over what I see as the motivation for separating Careers from MSO. I didn't explain that well.

I don't think that Careers is suffering by being included in Meta.SO. From everything I can tell, Careers questions are answered quickly and well.
I think Meta.SO is suffering by including Careers.

Meta.SO is the catchall for questions without a dedicated meta, but Careers is big enough to warrant a dedicated meta (or other support setup). Metas allow community members to discuss and determine the character of that community. Including Careers in Meta.SO hinders SO community members doing the community building that Meta.SO is meant to enable.

Jeff also mentioned plans for Meta.SE to come back, which will shift the problem from Meta.SO to Meta.SE and amplify it because Careers will be an even larger portion of Meta.SE.

Answer 1

Posts tagged careers very rarely account for much more than 3% on average* of everything posted on Meta in a given month. The exception was right after Careers was initially introduced, but even then the percentages weren't astronomical by any means.

By comparison, a significantly larger portion of questions end up being closed each month, without accounting for the ones that are also subsequently deleted (typically quite a few, given how many completely off-topic things are often posted).

You state that

Including Careers in Meta.SO hinders SO community members doing the community building that Meta.SO is meant to enable

but you don't really elaborate on what part of their presence is actually hindering anything. Given that the careers posts average less than one per day, it can't be that they're taking up precious front page real estate, since that simply wouldn't be true.

I also don't think that people are somehow reluctant to post because of the presence of careers questions, since there's absolutely nothing to suggest that's the case. So, where's the actual problem that this proposed split would address?

As a side note, Careers does have its own dedicated team within Stack Exchange. While public support requests are directed to Meta, they also receive feedback directly at their [email protected] email address.

_{*I apologise for this SQL}

Answer 2

I'm not sure the reward to work ratio would really be all that high for giving careers its own meta; the ratio may be negative, in fact.

MSO has been doing a great job of responding to careers questions. Careers administrators have been monitoring the tag, and responding to questions effectively.

Why should the team go through the trouble of changing things?

Answer 3

I'm impartial on this topic. However, I believe that both the questions and other answers skirt the issue at heart, and don't really benefit. Whether or not MSO suffers from the presence of meta-Careers questions is not a good measure of judgement. You can sort, exclude tags, and you have multiple tools to help see the questions you want to see.

You also get similar results if the programmers for the site automatically hid careers tagged questions. People who are perusing the careers tag, continue to do so. People who ignore careers tag, continue to do so. But you would only need to do so if the tag became excessively large. And then you set a precedence for tags being considered for auto-hide. You'd never consider doing this to another tag, so separating the tag from MSO cannot have a valid justification when considering statistics on its use.

The real issue is a community issue. Is Careers a distinct community from Stack Overflow?

If Careers is attached to the Stack Overflow community, then it should be joined to Stack Overflow somehow? If not, should it be limited to programming only jobs?

That tells you whether it should have it's own meta.

I believe it's a subcommunity, not a distinct one. You need to consider that if it did have it's own meta, it wouldn't get attention from people in MSO that didn't peruse meta-Careers.