Some of it is culture. I worked for a large F50 company pre-pandemic that was remote friendly (at least in our org) and all communication was async, all serious discussion happened on mailing lists and the internal github, ad-hoc meetings were generally discouraged.
I have joined a FAANG recently and by comparison their culture is painful for remote, despite them having 2 years to refine during the pandemic. It is slowly getting better this last year, but culturally they are still years away from being effective at remote.
For those who say Real Estate is the reason, that math doesn't add up there. Apple doesn't give a shit about 5 billion dollars in real estate that is wasted if they think it will make employees less productive. That's a rounding error on most of their products. They genuinely believe it's at worst neutral to demand RTO.
I have joined a FAANG recently and by comparison their culture is painful for remote, despite them having 2 years to refine during the pandemic. It is slowly getting better this last year, but culturally they are still years away from being effective at remote.
For those who say Real Estate is the reason, that math doesn't add up there. Apple doesn't give a shit about 5 billion dollars in real estate that is wasted if they think it will make employees less productive. That's a rounding error on most of their products. They genuinely believe it's at worst neutral to demand RTO.