Are these questions unique to specific jobs / career paths and thus off topic?

Question

Are the below questions unique to specific jobs / career paths (i.e. not generalizable)?

Are they off topic for this reason?

I see similar questions, but I'm still left a bit unsure.

The questions:

• What would my actual duties be per this job description?
• https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/22947/what-are-common-job-titles-for-roles-that-helps-to-improve-cross-functional-busi

My guess is that these would fall under:

Questions seeking advice on what job to take, what skills to learn, etc. are off-topic as the answers are rarely useful to anyone else.

But, as per the help center (the first reason), this appears to be more for opinion-based questions, which this doesn't really seem to fall under. Or does this fall under "How do I learn to be a..." / "How do I perform the job of a ..." (even though it doesn't seem to classify as "the learning/applying of specific job functions")?

Shouldn't we perhaps modify the above reason for this?

Questions seeking advice on what job to take, what skills to learn, advice which can't be generalized to other jobs or career paths, etc. are off-topic as the answers are rarely useful to anyone else.

Or have a close reason specifically for this?

And modify the on-topic page a bit with regard to this?

Answer 1

The thing that stands out about the two questions you referenced is that it appears we, as a community, may have actually done a good job in answering them.

In both cases, while somewhat speculative, user JB King answers by taking an objective stance, describing a few different likely solutions. The fact that there's references to Wikipedia articles suggests that there is somewhat of a standard regarding job titles, even if some companies do make up their own titles or sometimes tweak the job descriptions based on their own whims.

The thing about generalization is scale. For our site to continue to succeed, questions and answers should apply to enough people to where the content will help lots of people. This is of course a subjective criteria, one which is difficult to compartmentalize. Thus, Stack Exchange removed the "too localized" close reason precisely because many people misunderstood what types of questions to use it for.

A question about a job title, and the answers, may benefit many people also looking for work in the same career field. Sure, it won't benefit everyone, but it should benefit enough people to where it provides some measurable value to future visitors.

The other point to consider is this: Really general questions may arguably be more likely to be basic questions, questions that have already been asked and answered in other places. To disallow questions that aren't "general enough" may inadvertently throw out the tougher questions that Joel Spolsky, CEO and co-founder of Stack Exchange, describes in the blog post titled, "Sites for experts":

The power of the Stack Exchange platform is detailed, expert answers to extremely rare, ‘long-tail,’ highly technical questions. To get expert answers, you need experts. To attract experts, you need a site where people are asking very interesting and hard questions, not the basic questions, so that it’s clear that this is a PRO site, not a consumer/enthusiast site.... and remember, the pro sites WILL attract the enthusiasts, but not the other way around.

To answer more definitively, I wouldn't suggest adding these to the close reasons while the questions are open and getting good, useful answers. However, I'd like to hear more from members of the community before any definitive decisions are made.