<p>I personally do not have problems with the 'do my professional work' question an sich. That means, to me the fact that people are getting paid for answers to questions that other people gave is not a problem (and you could extend this type of questions to more than people with real jobs, also researchers, teachers, other goverment employees and students can produce these type of questions). </p>

<p>However the 'do my professional work' type questions do often have a certain characteristic that makes them on the edge of being off-topic. Stackexchange is not a crowdsourcing website, like Kaggle or InnoCentive, where solutions are given to problems that have a much larger scale, but also much more specific. </p>

<p>The principle mentioned by GlenB</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>"is this a question whose answer will help the next person with a similar issue?"</p>
</blockquote>

<p>is often missing in these questions. It is not always so much off-topic because, too broad, off-topic, or not about statistics, but because the problem is a very specific, esoteric, complex question dealing with a problem of the OP but very difficult to translate into a general issue that many people are gonna have (or at least somebody searching for a solution to a similar problem that depends on the same principle might not find or understand the question)</p>

<p>Like Tim's answer states one way to close this question is using off-topic with the specification 'not about statistic...', or like the OP states also the 'too broad' classification can be used for such questions.</p>

<p>I guess it is not so much problematic to describe how we currently can close these questions, and instead the main point is the question whether we should change this? Regarding this issue it is interesting to remark two current practices which are already in place related to other types of closing.</p>

<ul>
<li><p><strong>There is a special page to help people write self-study questions.</strong> </p>

<p><strong>In the case of self-study questions we have a specific way to close the question</strong> (as well as even a specific tag but that might be another discussion). I imagine the same is possible as well for professional work questions (I am stating it is possible, I am not sure we should do it). </p>

<p>So we (some) <em>do</em> to some extend care about the intent of the questioner. Although again here not so many are against the good statistical questions involved in course work, and that closing option exists mostly because of the quality. For example: do not simply copy-paste your homework questions on this website, but at least make it into a decent and useful question (you modify this principle analogously as 'do not simply copy-paste your professional work questions on this website, but at least...').</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>Self-study questions (including textbook exercises, old exam papers,
  and homework) that seek to understand the concepts are welcome, but
  those that demand a solution need to indicate clearly at what step
  help or advice are needed. For help writing a good self-study
  question, please visit the meta pages.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>In the meta-pages it is written how to write a good self-study question (actually not so clearly since the <a href="https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12/how-should-we-deal-with-obvious-homework-questions">refered page</a> is more like a discussion for the community, how should we deal with these questions, rather than brief clear information for a new user that is asking a question). We could have something equivalent for how to write a good professional (applied) question (although I am not very aware whether the issue is such problematic to do all this effort, yet at least some people, including me, are sometimes annoyed, to some extend, by the questions). </p></li>
</ul>

<p>.</p>

<ul>
<li><strong>In the case of questions that are too broad we refer to <a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask">'how to ask'</a>. In the case of off-topic (not about statistics) we refer to <a href="https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/793/internet-support-for-statistics-software">'support links'</a>.</strong> For people that are asking the problematic questions, often new users of the website, it may not always be as easy to get to the right help to improve the question. The problems with a 'do my professional work for me' type of question may not always be so clearly defined in as a single case of the many options we have to close a question. Because of that some wider support might be useful. Some solution might be that the off-topic close option might also have the 'how to ask' link in it, for instance. What I did <a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/323385/modeling-observed-data-using-simulated-datasets-of-different-quality">before</a> (in the few times I have voted to close) is also use the 'off-topic, other' closing option and specify more precisely what can be changed to improve the question. This would be nice in many more cases, a better explanation of down votes and close votes.</li>
</ul>
