What's the water cooler?

Question

Proposal: Around the Water Cooler

What do you mean "Water Cooler?" How isn't this already covered by other expert sites, or those questions that fill the cracks between?

Answer 1

Define the Water Cooler:

Best-of-breed practices and advice from professionals in all fields.

My flow through the StackOverflow/Exchange network started with SuperUser and ended at Programmers.SE. Moving from SU to SO I found it interesting that you started to have more “give” to the questions, some things weren't cut and dry as “Why isn't my home computer seeing the internet?”

Programmers.SE was created as a “meta-programming” site, and has since been defined by the community as a site to ask non-programming (but programming related) questions (of programmers). This means all the “Why Visual Studio not IntelliJ?” and “Is recursion more efficient here?” questions fit right in. In fact, a good majority of questions have since been migrated from StackOverflow to Programmers.

Sounds great, what's the issue?

The issue is that we are seeing a number of questions on programmers that don't pertain to programmers specifically. Things like “What is your ideal office chair?”, “How do I handle a workaholic?”, and “How do you deal with headaches while working?” have been closed with a firm [off-topic] stamp.

A general business SE site will fill the void the Programmers is filling in regards to SO — general best practices and advice that don't pertain to any particular expert field.