Not really. 

First of all "professional" is more than just a job-description with a paycheck, it's a mindset. But more on that later.

Over the years the ServerFault community has evolved a rough consensus definition of what that phrase means. There are two broad categories we assess new questions against regarding 'professional capacity'.

 1. The system being asked about is a production system.
 1. Knowledge, asking style, and evidence that the asker has the right mindset  
    (a.k.a. the "is a professional" test)

The first is more concrete and overlaps with a few other items in the FAQ under *NOT About*. The second is much more complex.

***

**Production Systems**

This is more of an exclusionary line. Questions that fail this test are also likely one or more of:

 - In the home (failing the *anything in a home setting* and likely *career education* points in the FAQ)
 - Being built purely to learn new things (failing the *career education* point in the FAQ)
 - Hypothetical what-if questions (failing the *career education* point in the FAQ, and a big risk of failing the *is a professional* test, see below)
 - Development systems (likely failing the *anything in a home setting* point in the FAQ, and debatably more topical on StackOverflow)

We've found that scoping "professional capacity" to just production systems does a great job of keeping questions definitely topical.

Of these the *development systems* item gets us the most pushback. There are very good reasons we eliminate these systems from consideration:

 - The [SO FAQ](http://stackoverflow.com/faq) states that "software tools commonly used by programmers" is topical.
 - The large majority of such questions ServerFault gets relate to setting up development environments on laptops or virtual-machines on laptops.
  - Apple laptops and Virtual Box VMs are two areas that professional sysadmins have very little *professional* experience with.
 - Such installs typically use frameworks not actually used in production, such as XAMP/LAMP/MAMP installers, which sysadmins have little experience with.
 - Such installs commonly use configuration settings that are against best-practice for production systems, which sysadmins have little experience with.

**Is a professional**

Good questions are ones that demonstrate that the asker has the mindset of a professional sysadmin. A question that passes this test demonstrates several of the following qualities:

 - Shows that they've done some research before coming here, usually by including the results of their failed searches.
 - Uses professional language instead of casual, vulgar or shorthand.
 - Knows enough about their problem to include the right details instead of all of the details.
 - Shows sufficient skill in the technology under question to be able to work on it for pay.
 - Demonstrates knowledge of better-practices through how their environment is put together.

Hypothetical what-if questions frequently fail this test, but some don't.