I looked, and guess what: Not only did the mods close it out of some insane sense of tidiness, and not only did they hide it from normal viewing; they apparently deleted it entirely. All our writing, all the good comments, all the voting: gone forever, without warning or apparent recourse.
So fuck them and their petty, arrogant bureaucracy. I will never write an answer for them again.
The problem is that any gameified system, like a karma or reputation system, attracts people good at interpreting rules strictly and finding efficient ways to exploit them. So you're actually selecting for literalist rules lawyers.
That's why I consider this the most brilliant bit of Wikipedia's policies: "If a rule prevents you from improving Wikipedia, ignore it." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules
There's a great discussion of that here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_%22Ignore_all_ru...
Last time this blew up on HN, some of the principals of SO turned up here, as did a bunch of mods. They were mostly unable to discuss the issues in terms of serving the audience; they just kept falling back on The Rules. An attitude, I'm sure, which quickly drove off anybody with common sense. So now they have achieved glorious groupthink: everybody they normally talk to agrees with them about The Rules.
This specific question was turning into crap fast, with answers like "Sounds like your friend is a bit of a dick. Noone wants to work for him." (since deleted). Closing it only prevents further answers, as it was obvious they were deteriorating. Still, the closure and any closure, is reversible, people always have the choice to vote to re-open if they feel the closure wasn't justified.
For example: If you're worried a page will disappear, go to foo.com and paste the address. If it does disappear, you can go back to foo.com and retrieve the content, link to foo.com instead etc..
In the early days of stackoverflow I seem to recall they had a policy of keeping similar or even duplicate questions. The reasoning was that the extra interpretations of the same question made it easier to find them in a google search. What they have now seems entirely the opposite, content being removed to the point where it doesn't exist in any form. I don't really care if someone thinks a piece of content is on topic or relevant, if it isn't relevant to me I just won't look at it.
And why delete anything? Surely they are not running out of space. I'll volunteer $100 so they can buy another Terabyte to store those deleted discussions.
It works like this: The oldsters perceive that they enjoy a certain elite status by virtue of how long they've been there, and begin to think of themselves as the "keepers" of the community. They also develop a measure of contempt for newbies, perhaps because they (being new) want to talk about things that the oldsters have had a chance to discuss many times before. And perhaps because they (being new) represent a slightly different culture, which triggers stereotypical "kids these days" instincts.
So they begin taking measures to protect the site from junior members. A positive spin is put on it by calling it "upholding community standards", but it would be just as fair to negatively characterize it as "telling those damn kids to get off my lawn." I suppose which one you think it is depends on whether you're the one yelling or being yelled at.
Either way, the terminal point is that everyone has gone to have fun somewhere else, essentially because that's precisely what they had been told to do, and all that's left is a hoary old collection of ossified cucumbers fondly remembering how much fun they used to have and wondering where the magic went.
At an old-fashioned web forum I used to run we toyed with the idea of closing down and archiving old threads after they reached a certain age. The idea was to try and codify our opinion that old conversations might be worth preserving for posterity, but they aren't a substitute for new conversations and shouldn't be used as an excuse to stifle them. Never actually got around to implementing it, though.
When I found out about it, I thought it could be interesting, so I made a habit of visiting a few times a week to see what it was all about.
I stopped visiting after a few weeks because nobody knows what the point is. 90% of the interesting questions are closed as off-topic, closed because they "belong on Stack Overflow", or are closed because the answers are debatable.
It's kind of silly, really.
It's not 'anything goes', however.
This is a close call, but I agree with the closing in that the post conflicted with the rules. It's possible it could have been worded better to avoid being closed, but even general employee retention strategies don't belong on that site.
The problem isn't that they don't allow discussion, it's that the range of topics allowed is so narrow. There are many (I've lost count) StackExchange sites, and each one has a very narrow, well-defined (but, importantly, poorly-communicated) breadth of allowable topics. And, if you get the wrong bucket it's closed and that's that.
It is a mystery to me why a question that yields some answers that are directly about engineers and some that could apply more widely could be considered off topic. One answer explicitly cites the Joel Test. Another specifically discussed the economics of software development, and why the management behavior is pathological specifically for engineering organizations. How much more on topic does one need to be?