Most (if not all) of the answers so far have been in direct relationship to the IT field - however, the title of this site is "The Workplace", not "The IT Workplace".
Are non-IT related questions on-topic?
Whatever this decision is should be encoded in the FAQ, since that way we have it documented.
I have been deliberately answering questions in a domain-neutral way, so far as is possible, so as you can probably tell, I think:
Yes.
It may be the case that many of the members of the private beta are in fact involved in IT - there's a heavy bias as a result of the size of the trilogy. That being said, there is no reason to restrict ourselves to the IT workplace and comparing/contrasting with other industries will provide better perspective.
I would hope and expect that non IT questions are on topic, otherwise this site would be a subset of Programmers.
I would also expect most questions in the private beta (and indeed the early public beta) to be IT related simply because of the existing audience.
Once the site hits public beta it's up to all of us to publicise the site to our non-IT friends and acquaintances so that the user base can be broadened.
Very important question.
Just because of the demographics of the first users here, we're inevitably going to skew towards IT-related questions, but I think we should make a concerted effort to pull back in the other direction, as ninefingers says:
deliberately answering questions in a domain-neutral way, so far as is possible
Otherwise we might just as well migrate all of the closed Programmers questions here...
It appears to me that lots of job related questions on Programmers are getting closed as "off topic" so I do not believe that this site will be a subset of Programmers. Once it gets out of the private beta, I predict a number of other sites will put their own job related questions on the off-topic list and migrate them here.
