I too worked in the office for ~10 years and have been working from home for about 10 years now. The "upward mobility" point I would agree with but imo that is

I too worked in the office for ~10 years and have been working from home for about 10 years now. The "upward mobility" point I would agree with but imo that is up to the employee to be (or not) comfortable with that. I've been in the same engineer/architect role for the past 10 years or so and don't have an issue doing that for 10 more years. Also there are ways of reaching out to the execs other than hallway conversations. As for the large chunk of "insight and productivity coming from informal conversations" - that depends on the company culture and "weight distribution" of the technical and industry knowledge among team members. I've work remotely for a couple of fortune 50 companies as well as small (like 5 ppl small) startups and the only time this sort of thing was an issue was when I was literally the only remote employee on the team, but my technical/industry strength outweighed the concern so they were almost forced to keep me in the loop to provide insight from my end.