Every few months a CEO stands up and says young workers need to come back to the office to learn from their elders. Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan said it. He told his staff in 2023 that remote work “doesn’t work” for younger employees who need mentorship. The claim spread like a cold in an open-plan office. Remote work, we were told, starved a generation of the wisdom that only happens when a junior person overhears a senior person on a call.

Here is the problem. Mentorship was already dying in the office, and nobody blamed the office.

Think about what actual mentorship requires. A senior person notices you, decides you’re worth their time, and spends it on you. That is a choice. It was always a choice. The idea that it happened automatically because you shared a floor is a fantasy. I sat ten feet from senior engineers for years and learned almost nothing from proximity. I learned when someone deliberately reviewed my code and explained why it was bad.

The research backs this up. A 2022 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research looked at software engineers and found that feedback on code dropped when they went remote, especially for young workers and women. Real effect. But read what actually caused it: senior people stopped bothering to comment. The tool was still there. The intent left. Remote work didn’t remove mentorship. It removed the social pressure that guilted busy people into doing the bare minimum.

The counterargument is fair: those hallway moments, the overheard call, the quick “hey can you look at this,” genuinely helped. I believe that. But those moments were cheap accidents, not real teaching, and companies leaned on accidents because they never built anything better.

So think about the nurse training a new hire, the plumber taking on an apprentice. That works because someone is assigned to do it, on purpose, with time carved out. Nobody expects an apprentice plumber to learn by osmosis in the break room.

Mentorship needs a person who decides to teach. Build that, remote or not. Blame the manager who didn’t, not the desk they didn’t share.