I often here that employers or consulting clients don't want to hire remote workers because of the tremendous value of "water cooler" conversations. How much d

I often here that employers or consulting clients don't want to hire remote workers because of the tremendous value of "water cooler" conversations. How much do those water cooler conversations actually take place? How much value is actually produced from them? Most of my career has been on-site (ie. not remote). In twenty-seven years I can only recall once such conversation that produced anything of value. I was making coffee at 6 Infinite Loop one day, when I was a "Debug Meister" at Apple. Another Debug Meister by the name of Dave Lyons happened to ask what I thought of C++. "It's slow," I replied. "I prefer C." "Why?" "Because of the use of vtables for virtual functions." "But you need a dispatch mechanism in any language." Well that made sense to me, actually using tables of pointers to functions is common in C as well, so I agreed to take C++ seriously after that. However, I did not actually use C++ in my work until I'd moved on to a different company. That's all I can think of, in my 27 year career, that being on-site has resulted in a water cooler conversation that produced something of lasting value.