Every remote-work argument eventually ends up into the same disagreement: whether a job is allowed to be just a job, or whether it's still supposed to be the place your life happens.
One side points out that showing up in person is how you build relationships and knowledge, and that the office years are exactly the years you can least afford to trade away for a commute-free morning.
The other side points out that the deal behind that advice, time traded for stability, hasn't been honored by employers in a long time, so why keep paying for it unilaterally.
Caught between the two is a claim that survives most of that back-and-forth unchallenged: that even if you owe your employer nothing, the people you happen to meet on the job could still be your key to future opportunities. A win-win, of sorts.
Except that a "win-win" is doing a lot of unexamined work in that sentence, because it assumes the office is generating a real match between you and the people worth knowing, rather than just sorting you into a room by accident. Meeting people through work relies on the random selection of whoever happens to be sitting in your same office, and once you say it plainly like that, the win-win framing starts to look a lot more like a coin flip you've decided to be grateful for. Your network is, without question, one of the primary drivers of future opportunity. But a network assembled from proximity, from whoever your employer happened to hire onto your floor, is a network you were handed, not one you built, filtered entirely through decisions made in rooms you were never in.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should, because nobody applies "just take what's nearby" logic anywhere else in life that actually matters. No one searching for a co-founder or an investor treats their own office as an adequate search radius; everyone intuitively understands that better matches come from wider search, not narrower search. But hand someone a badge and a desk, and the same person will accept "whoever happens to be nearby" as a perfectly good career strategy, mistaking a small, arbitrary sample for a functioning system.
The scale problem is what finally breaks the case for it.
Even in the generous scenario where your office is full of sharp, well-connected people, you're capped at the size of that office, and the cap barely moves across a career. A handful of companies over twenty years yields a few dozen meaningful contacts if you're lucky, most of which quietly dissolve the moment you leave, because proximity was the only thing holding the relationship together in the first place (see Prestige Is a Currency).
Compare that to the people who actually compound a network over decades, and you'll notice they're rarely doing it by osmosis: they're doing it on purpose, through communities and writing and repeated voluntary contact with people nobody assigned to them.
None of this means the office is worthless, or that the "clock in, clock out" crowd has the fuller picture either: real relationships do start at work, and proximity remains one of the oldest, most reliable ways humans end up close to each other. But there's a real difference between a byproduct and a strategy, and the two get confused constantly, precisely because the byproduct works often enough to feel like a plan.
The office hands you a network by accident. Building one on purpose is a different skill altogether, and most people never bother learning it, since the accidental version was good enough for long enough to make the deliberate one feel unnecessary, right up until the day it isn't.
