With the work experience threads concluded and all listed in the FAQ page, I want to thank everyone that contributed. We were able to collect over 200 replies across 14 different engineering disciplines — something I haven't seen done anywhere else on the internet, which is amazing!

If you missed the initial posting, some of them haven't been archived yet and you can still add your comments to them for a while longer.

Reports: how YOU can make AskEngineers way better!

Before I talk about anything else, I briefly want to mention the report function.

Right now, almost nobody submits reports. This is bad because it lets a lot of low-quality posts slip past the moderator queue (which we look at on a daily basis). I encourage everyone to start using reports — if you've judged that a post or comment doesn't belong in AskEngineers, report it. We'll evaluate them case-by-case.

Note: reports are not "super downvotes", so don't use them that way.

Here are all the reasons you can report a post or comment, which are conveniently the same as the guidelines in the sidebar. If a post doesn't break one of these rules, consider whether your judgment is correct or not; we're always available by mod mail if you aren't sure.

Lessons learned

The work experience threads were first started 2 years ago by nosjojo, and came out of the need to make the FAQ page able to answer common questions from the inevitable waves of engineering students and freshly graduated engineers every season; it's our eternal September and something we have to deal with on a regular basis whether we like it or not.

When I decided to run the posts again, I organized them a little differently and shilled the post in other subreddits to gather outside interest. This worked well, but there were problems which became apparent after the first few. Originally each thread was supposed to last 2 weeks or if 20 responses were gathered (whichever came first), and the next thread would be posted. As I continued, I found that I would either forget to post them, or didn't have time to. This didn't end up being a huge deal, but it was a pain for the mods to keep on top of.

After this experience, we've pinned down how to make these threads consistently more organized simply by adding them to Automoderator's schedule. Moving forward, because reddit archives posts 6 months after posting, there will be several yearly posts on rotation:

Career threads

Some users have expressed that they really dislike seeing career-related questions on AskEngineers. Career questions have always been allowed, with a mixture of quality ranging from fantastic (1, 2, 3) to annoying. Many of you only want to see technical content. I get it.

This policy was inherited when I joined as moderator, and we haven't taken any huge measures to cut down on the number of them outside of having weekly threads and improving the FAQ. This is intentional, mainly because AskEngineers is one of the few places on the internet where you can get real information about a career in engineering, and have honest and valuable discussions on how to navigate the pitfalls. I think that's relevant and valuable to many of you, so career questions are here to stay.

However, we'll try to do a better job of cleaning up low-quality posts by locking them and warning users to read our Content Guidelines before posting. How well we do depends on you helping us out by reporting bad posts. Repeat offenders will be subject to temporary and/or permanent bans. I get the feeling that we're letting too many of the "annoying" threads have a free pass without any consequences, but I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts on this.

If you're looking for technical content, here are numerous forums that are strictly for this purpose, such as engineering.StackExchange, eng-tips, and various subreddits (listed in the sidebar).

That about covers everything new for now. We're still working on getting everything integrated, but stay tuned for a new flair application thread soon. We're also recruiting new moderators in the near future.

And as always, any other feedback about the subreddit is welcome.