When clicking the 'Location' field on the careers site, I can choose a distance… in miles…

Most people on this planet don't really know what a mile is and if they are like me, they don't really care :-/

So I suggest you add the option to use the metric system, or if the option already exists, to make it (much) more visible, because I couldn't locate it.

Just to let you know that this could be a big deal, let me show you a map of countries using the metric system (Hint: it isn't the red ones O.o):

enter image description here

Anyhow, I know Liberia, Burma and such are important markets for Stack Exchange, but the rest of the world uses this site as well ;-)

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    Mandatory The Oatmeal: theoatmeal.com/comics/senior_year – Konamiman Oct 9 '15 at 7:54
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    This is deceptive: England uses miles. – tchrist Oct 9 '15 at 11:09
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    This map is more accurate cdn3.chartsbin.com/chartimages/… ;) – DavidPostill Oct 9 '15 at 11:48
  • @DavidPostill I see no yellow. Ireland would have been yellow not long ago. – TRiG Oct 9 '15 at 12:12
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    @TRiGisTimothyRichardGreen Not long ago? Distance signposts in Northern Ireland show distances in miles, while all signposts placed in the Republic since the 1990s use kilometres. – DavidPostill Oct 9 '15 at 12:17
  • @DavidPostill As I said, yellow: Distances in km, but speed limits in mph. We had that here in Ireland not long ago. We have now switched to km/h. – TRiG Oct 9 '15 at 12:19
  • @TRiGisTimothyRichardGreen OK. So it was yellow but green now? Isn't that what the map shows? I don't understand your point. That is not meant to be a historical map. – DavidPostill Oct 9 '15 at 12:25
  • @DavidPostill My point is that it has yellow in the key, though it appears nowhere on the map. Which is odd. That's all. Remarks about Ireland were incidental, but may explain why the yellow key exists. – TRiG Oct 9 '15 at 12:29
  • @TRiGisTimothyRichardGreen Ah OK. Got it. – DavidPostill Oct 9 '15 at 12:45
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    Never mind distance in miles; why is it that 99.9% of Americans assume the whole world uses their whacky mm-dd-yyyy date format (when actually only they do)? – Bohemian Oct 16 '15 at 13:57

We actually do have kilometers as part of our localization system, but there seem to be a couple bugs in here. We'll look into it.

Also, the first time we did this, we flipped Northern Ireland and the UK over to kilometers. We won't make that mistake again.


Took a bit longer that we had expected. This was like bug inception, but it should all be fixed now. The localization choices between km and miles is determined by your location, not language preferences or whether you are on .com or .com/de or .com/fr


It could be as simple as this (adjusting the CSS-ishies, of course):

enter image description here

  • This could work rather nicely - a constructive compromise! – user306364 Oct 9 '15 at 8:07
  • 20 miles = 32.1869 Km ;) – DavidPostill Oct 9 '15 at 11:41
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    @DavidPostill In that case: "19.8839 miles/32 Km" :-) – Konamiman Oct 9 '15 at 13:18
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    The fix we're actually putting in (although this was cool) is simply based off your location which determines km or miles preference. In our localization system right now, that is tied to language preference, which is wrong. It will behave much more like our currencies for employers, which are not tied to languages but rather locations. – Will Cole Oct 9 '15 at 16:01

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