It really is solid advice, though. People who have connections to others at work have a much easier time getting promotions and whatnot. It helps you with being plugged into the office gossip network, which is always a powerful tool in these situations. ETC.

going to lunch with coworkers is a good one. no one said you have to go to happy hour everyday with them (unless you want to) but going to lunch is a good way to be sociable and makes for a better work environment usually.

becoming too personal with coworkers can be an issue. half of our department are all "buddies" now and it creates a lot of problems with the team. they know far too much of each others business and tend to have some loose lips. plus, these lunches end up being ***** fests.

i keep most at an arms length when it come to anything too personal. keep it to business and i try to be as neutral as possible.

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I think going to lunch with coworkers (and bosses) is practically essential unless they're just really truly unbearably awful (and if they were you'd probably just resign?).

A coworker of mine was just talking today about how folks in my dept at work, while out having drinks, just decided (despite it being very much discouraged by the firm) to share details of their salaries with each other and now people know if they're getting shafted and taken for a ride salary-wise, and a lot of people seem to have bailed recently or are ready to bail imminently, which I am supposing is related. You might never get to know something like that if you don't cosy up to your colleagues a little bit.

Being in the loop with office gossip helps in progressing I think, it means you always know how to position yourself to your best advantage in relation to everything that's going on around you.

Apparently this is a big thing for women- women tend to talk to their friends about their salaries, and "frame" how reasonable their salaries are in comparison to that. If a woman's friends are mostly other women, she'll end up assuming her salary is "fair" when in fact *all* the women are being paid less than equivalent men.