There is a vocal portion of Juniors who are struggling over the idea of making friends outside of college and have been seeking the work place as an option.
Yes, before the downvoters/extroverts start going on: Yes, in person meetings are good on an rare occasion. However, the claim that you have to be in person/"be social creatures" to work effectively is drastically overblown.
The peril is that you're missing out on opportunities and education that you don't even know about, because it happens when people can spontaneously interact in the same time and place. I say this as someone who strongly preferred to work from home as a junior, and now sees that I was misguided. Looking back over my career so far, the best stuff has happened when I was in the office.
A good portion of what happens in a high-performing office is spontaneous, and simply cannot be reproduced via asynchronous tools, even now. A lot of folks will tell you that this isn't true and that if we just somehow changed human nature and made everyone write every decision down (aka "a remote-first culture") there's no net loss, or mischaracterize in-office work as useless meetings or micromanagement or socializing (see sibling comment), but this is largely motivated reasoning. While there can be value in working that way, it's slower and less efficient -- a spontaneous 5-minute conversation will routinely save hours of writing and reading (which lots of folks won't do anyway).
There's always percentage of people who strongly prefer to just go into a silo and code (and those people are over-represented amongst junior engineers; and junior engineers are over-represented on HN), and there's definitely a lot of bad/pathological office environments, but the reality of software is that it's a team sport. Communication is the O(n^2) problem, and in-office communication is just more efficient, even if it leads to a reduction in velocity for any particular person.
One has to be nuanced -- everyone needs heads-down time, and that time can largely be done from anywhere -- but most teams benefit from spontaneous conversation, and most junior people benefit from this in ways that they don't realize.
This is true even for senior people: at this phase in my career I can go into a cave and be very individually productive, but that's not really my job now. Literally every time I'm in the office something happens where I'm able to catch or head off an inefficiency or mistake, or learn about some project that helps my own work. This is immensely valuable.
I’ll take that over the peril of ruining my health by driving an hour every day to be forced to stay inside all day and eat at shitty restaurants around the office.
