Hacker News Reader

Comment by lnsru | Hacker News Reader

Electronics in Europe is so dead. It is past the point where where it can be revived. One thing is sick overregulation to spin hardware product. Last nail in the coffin today is Cyber Resilience Act. It dwarfs all the regulations before it.

Second thing is talent. People can’t hardware anymore. I mean putting a 0402 capacitor on the printed circuit board is not hard. But doing that in meaningful way gets hard. As a contractor I designed few boards and optimized for production in China. In my dayjob colleagues are stuck in the last century. No recent knowledge about parts, design rules, testing principles… No willingness to learn and talk to Chinese manufacturers about optimization. Just copy paste bad decisions from old boards to new designs.

Honestly I wouldn’t even try to revive anything in Europe. Chinese electronics factories are way too far in the future. The suppliers for my workplace are all stuck in the past. Even the ones with new equipment struggle to use full potential due to worker’s shortage. Which is probably a problem in whole western world. Who wants to be manufacturing technician when you can be lifestyle influencer!?

View on HN

Hi, Augustin here, one of the presenters.

As other commenters pointed out, the electronics industry is quite big in Europe, on paper it generates a lot of money and sustains a lot of jobs. The issue is a bit more complex, and you point it out when you say people around you are old and old-fashioned.

Like I said in the talk: We used to laugh at the chinese products for how low quality they were 20 years ago, who's laughing now?

I don't believe europeans are unable to turn around this situation in as many years as a matter of fact, it's my core beliefs: That together with other young motivated people we'll build our own little electronics industry for ourselves, among ourselves and people who believe we can one day have theye crazy future factories in Europe.

Yes it's crazy hard, but like you I believe things will get sufficiently bad that more will see that the effort is worth it.

You should check out the 39c3 talk from Kliment, he understands this issue so well, and I'll paraphrase him here: Electronics is dominated by old dudes, the industry is hostile to newcomers, self-taught people, women, and more. But by making an effort to give people who are starting a good experience, we can turn this around.

Honestly there is no worker shortage, in my immediate contacts, I already know 2 or 3 people who are ready to work my production line: They have the smarts, skills, and time. They are unemployed because no one would respect them, and give them a meaningful mission like we would, and it's quite clear this is quite a widespread feeling among people.

I am afraid, that when it gets too bad and too obvious it will be too late.

For me first steps would be turning bureaucratic ship around and making regulatory framework simpler and cheaper. With some exceptions for startups/small companies during very first months or years. The industry would be more attractive and with more demand for European electronics manufacturing. With more demand it would slowly start growing domestically. It’s insane that the rules for my 1 person company are the same as for Bosch or Siemens. I can praise good lobbyists work. There are two engineers at my dayjob that are writing mandatory documents about cadmium amount in screws or calculating sustainability parameters…

This is happening already! The 28th regime (https://www.europarl.europa.eu/committees/en/the-28th-regime...) will simplify the framework to register and operate companies in the EU, also the push by the EU commission to implement the Draghi report (https://commission.europa.eu/topics/competitiveness/draghi-r...) is one of deregularization of the industry.

Of course quasi monopolies of European industry are hoping to lobby these measures to suit them more than small players, but I am hopeful, as we have some very good legislators and politicians who are on our side.

Also Eurostack (of which Eilbek Research is a member) is a lobbyist group pushing for Draghi-adjacent policies, most of all: Relocating the entire cloud stack to Europe. And while for the bigger members of this organization it means having our own Google or Facebook (including their harms), it cannot help but inadvertently push the EU to pass laws that will further the agenda of eroding the USA-Tech monopolies.

Cory Doctorow pushes this narrative (https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/15/freedom-of-movement/) that this can only be a benefit in the medium term.

Things are moving in the right direction, not many are talking about it, but when things hit mainstream news, they're already old by the reality's standard.

> Electronics is dominated by old dudes, the industry is hostile to newcomers, self-taught people, women, and more. But by making an effort to give people who are starting a good experience, we can turn this around.

Completely agree.

Then the Semi industry wonders why they're running out of people

>Then the Semi industry wonders why they're running out of people

Yes but they make up with via immigration of candidates on visa. Last time I worked in semi, about 30% of colleagues were on visa from abroad. Today from former collogues still there, I hear it's close to 50%.

>I don't believe europeans are unable to turn around this situation in as many years as a matter of fact, it's my core beliefs

Actually, I DO believe we are unable to turn it around. I've done EE work both in Europe and in China for over a span of 10 years, and what sets China apart from Europe that enabled them to overtake us is the mindset, both at government support level AND at individual level.

Chinese operated a lot closer in mentality of the US compared to Europeans, as in very cutthroat move fast and break things, wanting to ship a new product every 6 months(!). This mentality is lacking in Europe who mostly stick to slow paced industries where there's a national security, regulatory or bureaucratic moat like aerospace, defense, telco, industrial automation or automotive, but nothing cutting edge in consumer space that's dominated by China, Korea, Japan and US.

Then there's the massive investments and support from the Chinese state that's missing in European electronics industry. To get an idea compare to the massive sums Europe invests in pharma(or life sciences) versus pitiful investments in electronics for example, and you'll get what I mean.

Until those change, we have no chance, we're just dreaming and huffing copium that somehow things will magically improve out of the blue.

>the industry is hostile to newcomers, self-taught people, women, and more.

Pretty much this, minus the hostility towards women part. I've had few women colleagues everywhere I worked in EE, there's no gender hostility or discrimination, just that young girls looking for a career, aren't really into sitting hunched down over a table and soldering and probing PCB's in a lab somewhere in a techo-park in the outskirts of town as a career, when stuff like HR, marketing, brand design in the city center, is way more hip and appealing to young urbanites. You can't force people to be attracted to a specific industry or line of work. Similarly how there's not much women in construction, welding, oil industry, fire fighters, LEO, etc and it's also not due to hostility, or how there's not too many men in nursing, HR or childcare.

> They are unemployed because no one would respect them, and give them a meaningful mission like we would

I hope you realize, you're not really selling the European electronics industry optimism here with this example of skilled people being passed on for employment.

> There's no gender hostility or discrimination

I disagree. There is a great deal of variation between countries and companies. My daughter is in automotive electronics (in R & D rather than manufacturing) and her employer and country are at the better end of the spectrum, but there are definitely places where it is very difficult for women.

> You can't force people to be attracted to a specific industry or line of work.

That depends on culture and upbringing. If you bring girls up to think that electronics or software or whatever is a male pursuit they will avoid it. A lot of this is set in early childhood and subtly so. Have you seen the difference in the toys little girls and boys get? Or who helps dad (and its almost always dad!) with the DIY or setting up a new gadget or similar tasks? I was my kids primary parent, so they picked up I liked and I just assumed my kids were likely to be interested in things I found interesting.

>There is a great deal of variation between countries and companies.

Well yes, that was also part of my point. I travelled and worked all over the world in my youth and what I noticed is that women typically choose engineering careers only for the money, stability and benefits of working at engineering corporation if the alternatives like humanities, soft sciences or social/government work pay like shit and the welfare state is lackluster like it's the case is North-/Latin- America, Asia or South/Eastern Europe, not because they're really passionate about engineering.

But if you're in a wealthy welfare state, with high taxes, low income disparity and and well funded government services where a women working as a school teacher for example can take home nearly the same as an engineer while having great government benefits, like Nordic or German speaking countries for instance, then women are more likely to choose those types of humanities careers or other such careers that revolve more around interacting with people over working in engineering.

It is literally that simple. There's no 4D chess psychology to dissect. If you have easy access to easy money, most people will choose the path of least resistance. It's all transactional following Maslow's pyramid of needs. SW dev would also have far fewer people in it if it weren't so well paid.

>but there are definitely places where it is very difficult for women.

Can you explain in detail how exactly those places make it difficult for women and it's not just the correlation I explained above?

Like I'm sure there's some toxic workplaces out there, but that's the case for everyone in a lot of jobs, including(or maybe even especially) those where women are majority, like HR.

In fact, from what I saw in engineering they tend to prioritize attracting female candidates in order to try to break up the massive sausage fest of this profession even if that part is never said out loud.

The regulations argument is a red herring: those mostly apply to electronics products sold in the EU, not manufactured in the EU. You have exactly the same burden trying to sell CN-manufactured hardware in the EU.

Worker's shortage is a real problem in China as well. Their approach? Automate everything. Focus on manufacturing 1000s of designs using a handful of standard formulas, instead of treating every design as bespoke. There's no reason this couldn't be done in the EU.

It's going to require a serious cultural shift, but given the right incentive I see no reason why it would be impossible.

> You have exactly the same burden trying to sell CN-manufactured hardware in the EU.

Not if you're a Chinese OEM: you just mail it in, and thanks to the arcane operation of international postage it's cheaper to post to Germany from China than from Germany. CE is such a European type of regulation, there's almost no enforcement, while at the same time it's so vague that simply working out what directives you might need to comply with is time-consuming.

Mind you as others have pointed out, there is still EU electronics. It's just not massive production runs for consumer electronics, much more of it is for defence, aerospace, and medical. And a bit of automotive, although that is definitely going to fall to Chinese car OEMs.

Europe is starting crack down on individual CN import - for exactly this reason. But that's still not going to solve the real problems EU-based hardware companies run into.

The whole problem is that the EU electronics industy is laser-focused on those defence and aerospace runs. They expect everything to be bespoke and complicated, so their entire business model is built around it.

But the vast majority of hardware isn't that complicated. I don't want a two-month ordering process with a "call for pricing" and a €1500 "engineering fee" - I want a JLCPCB-like instant quote and click-to-order for my dime-a-dozen 4-layer 10x10cm prototype!

The fact that a handful of industy giant are still doing production in Europe while moving at a glacial pace is not that relevant when China is rapidly out-innovating the West. If it continues like this, they will eventually die too.

Hey, original talk speaker here. I agree with this sentiment, we are very geared for high-quality, high-spec industrial designs in Europe.

CE for simple consumer products is actually not so pricy, and things are moving very quickly there in the right direction. We work with Smander.com for compliance, but there are others who offer it for cheap. The more expensive measurements are EMI, but in Germany universities will let you use their chamber at low cost or even for free if you are a small business or single person.

Honestly the problem with CE is misinformation most of all. It does not need to be complicated: Cheap standards can be bought from evs.ee for 30€, a couple of hours of a CE consultant cost is only a couple hundred, getting close to a university costs only time...

The goals of the EU is also to simplify these regulations, and things are also moving very fast there.

Funfact: If you are working in the industry, you know that there are many companies who produce electronics in Europe in general and some even in Germany.

Bosch, Continental, Siemens, Palfinger, FAUN, Webasto, Phoenix Contact, Beckhoff, …

The problem is the gap between hobbyist project and hundred-thousand-unit production run.

You can't easily and cheaply get 10, 100, or 1000 units manufactured in the EU the way you can in China. This pretty much kills hardware startups and scaleups wanting to do local manufacturing.

If you're not a multinational or have an essentially-unlimited budget for your small-scale run, you have to outsource it to China.

I work with companies, which have a more like small scale production. They are about 100 or so workers. Yes, this is also possible. They grew their business in the last 25 years, when it was even harder to produce something than these days. At least one of these business have PCB suppliers in the EU, which helped them in the post COVID crises where everybody struggled with supply.

I just named some big name brands. I also know mid-size and smaller brands.

Building your business and getting your stuff together is hard for any startup in any business field.

I can second that there are relatively small electronics manufacturers in Germany. I know a few myself, although I'm not working in that field.

I can third this observation. I've even had my flat above one of these for 10 years. Small company, privately-owned, five employees or so. They have a few pick-and-place machines (SIMATICs as far as I have seen) located in a small factory building and manufacture small production runs with them.

They don't have a real website advertising their services, but they seem to do well, probably their customers know them. They've run their business continuously for at least those 10 years I've lived at that spot. I could smell the soldering oven running constantly.

For an example with a website, see Waterott, it's run by one person who has a single Siplace SMT machine and stencils manually, and he has no issues earning money.

Could you perhaps share those PCBA businesses with us?

I tried quite hard to find them when I was still in the hardware world, and I never managed to find anything even remotely close to what China offers at less than 10x the price.

I'd love to give it another shot for some hobby projects if the industry has indeed changed in the last few years!

I can't share the name. I don't know their prices. I know that they are in Eastern Europe.

From my knowledge, the last time (2022ish) we talked about that was, that they don't take new customers for now. They are working at capacity.

probably the likes of Enics and GPV - nowadays this is likely a field overrun by military demand and private equity squeezing the supply side... Also I doubt that they can/want to compete with jlcpcb et al.

I think the original commenter means companies that manufacture their own products but do not offer manufacturing services.

You can't beat JLC because the model from JLC is that they lose money on all order less than 100 boards, so that they win order of 10 to 100k+

If you work in germany in engineering, you know a lot of mittelstand (SMEs) actually have some production machinery, as said, usually they have between 50 and 200 employees, and they manufacture pretty niche products up to 10k units a year or so.

They do not advertise this, as their business model is not manufacturing, it's selling their own products.

I am actually the speaker of the talk, and for us, manufacturing is not a business model either, it's just the capability we want to develop. Our business model would be to sell products. We shared our knowledge and results because we were curious about people's thoughts, and because if we fail and disapear we want this stuff to be online where other can find it.

>We shared our knowledge and results because we were curious about people's thoughts, and because if we fail and disapear we want this stuff to be online where other can find it.

For those who come after. ;-)

Disagree. The main reason we use chinese fabs is because we can actually get the goods in less than three weeks, so if we have a surge in sales we are covered pretty quickly.

The other reason is that we do some low complexity boards all specified with chinese parts, JLCPCB for the win, and our contractor agrees with us. They are not interested in those jobs because they can't possibly compete.

However, for our batch size/complexity our local contractor beats the chinese, by a good margin, and they keep growing the business. In Italy. The only problem we have with them is lead time, because there is always some hiccup, some missing part, some email that gets answered a day too late. I've been asking them for years to just provide their catalog with their partnumbers so i can just specify them in the BOM, and we won't waste all that time back and forth, but it's never been a true priority, but they do need to streamline the process. All european manufacturers need to streamline their process.

Another comment here lamented that the issue is that the fabs may try to treat every board as unique, whereas is should be us designers that adapt to them. I agree. That's a general issue in our attitude to designing a product, in many areas.

Yes, it's all about fast turnaround without pain.

Manufacturers in china just do it fast, and avoid all the pains, they actually care about customer experience above all, something we have to learn from ourselves obviously!

As I said in another comment, I fully expect things to change for the better: Some manufacturers will go out of business, but yet others will turn around in time.

All these people that were laid off will find jobs again, revitalizing moribund companies. Some will create their own companies, I view myself as part of this group.

I'd add Infineon to that list, formerly Siemens.

As far as I am aware the European plants survive mostly on decent QA and regulated industries. When the cost of a defect slipping QA is high, it can be cheaper to operate European plant with intra-step quality controls than manufacture in China and slap thorough QA on top.

Hitachi Energy as well, afaik anyway.

Fun fact: some of those companies are shutting down productions sites as we read this forum...

I feel like HN posters simply know the names of these companies because they're big, but don't actually work at those companies, otherwise they would know about the massive waves of layoffs and offshoring happening there lately.

I feel like some HN posters simply read news and don't work in the industry and have actual insights on what's happening.

Like Hydac moved some of there assembly from China to Germany.

A company in the district nearby, just moved their whole production from Thailand back to here. Yes, production costs are higher. But there is not transportation costs. They don't have long lead times anymore and can react more better to demand. So the overall costs assessment lead to the decision it is better to have production here locally.

I recommend to go to SPS, Agritechnica, and so and talk to actual people.

BTW: Even as Continental has layoff. There are other companies around that happily absorb those people. Because 2 years back, that had problems employing people.

>that had problems employing people

Who is "that" in this context? Can you be more specific.

>Even as Continental has layoff

Not just Conti, but all major automotive suppliers, semiconductor, embedded companies spread across Europe had mass layoffs.

And not everyone was quickly absorbed. I have EE friends almost a year unemployed after the layoffs. They apply but only get rejections, not sure why. It's a bloodbath right now in industries in high-CoL regions.

And is not only automotive. Other sectors are also suffering a lot. As you said, finding a new job is not very easy, even if you are ok with 1hs commute. As far as I know, all big companies are moving work outside the EU in a hurry.

I’m sure there is one or another company generating employment. I didn’t stated something different. Did I?

I just named a fact. I know people in at least 3 different companies in the list that lost their job last year, and many others which are in the list until 2030. The people that lost their jobs are/were more than 1 year searching. I’m talking with many “actual people” in different industries, and it is not looking very bright…

Most of the open positions is management of projects in other parts of the world. I see almost no development in SW or electronics going on here, much less production.

> that had problems employing people.

If possible I would like to know what positions and how much they were offering.

I had offerings for a manager position, 15 people, responsibility for the 15, including in house training of them, and part responsibility in the 5 different projects these people were working on. They wanted somebody with background in HW development, 10 years experience in FPGA, experience of at least 5 years Linux driver development, cryptography, at least 5 years managing people.

Wait for it… they offered 80k/year. I don’t know… seems little bit low somebody with like 20 years experience.

That's the dirty secret of "the employment shortage".

Under pay, no one takes the job, so justify off-shoring.

The truth, having talked to employees at big firms, is that in the past, entire factories were off shored to save 10 cents from one single part in a product.

Today, most jobs are not just under-paid, they are undignified. Because any job can be gratifying in the right circumstances, even a job on a factory line, it just has to:

1. Pay a fair wage 2. Be designed to be gratifying

Companies dont even care about their customers anymore, we all know it's been more than 15 years since they've cared about their employees. That's how entshittification goes.

Exactly. And sometimes even very strange things happen. Currently I know of a company taking lots of positions from Germany to China, people in China are having more money in the pocket per year. The cost to the company are basically the same, but people is more motivated. Mind you, that people are not working crazy hs! Mostly 8 to 9 hs per day 5 days a week.

>Under pay, no one takes the job, so justify off-shoring.

You mean to justify easy rubber stamping work visas on candidates from abroad.

Offshoring is usually last resort when costs other than labor are also much cheaper abroad like energy, or there's other incentives like government handouts or tax exemptions that high-CoL EU countries like France or Germany can't compete with.

>Companies dont even care about their customers anymore, we all know it's been more than 15 years since they've cared about their employees. That's how entshittification goes.

What solution would you suggest?

>Wait for it… they offered 80k/year. I don’t know… seems little bit low somebody with like 20 years experience.

In which country?

The sad thing is the state of supply and demand in the economy, doesn't really care how many years of experience you have, or how hard you worked, or how difficult the job is. It'll pay as little as they can get away with.

Sucks, but welcome to being a tax cattle in Europe, where someone on the dole with welfare and credits takes home nearly as much as you do. Thank our politicians for outsourcing everything that wasn't nailed to the ground for 20+ years in the name of shareholder growth.

> In which country?

South Germany. In a capital city. And that was “tops”

And as you say, 40% is out of the bat off. Then you have expensive energy also plagued with taxes… plus of course 19% VAT, etc, etc, etc… if somebody in USA could tell me what would you earn for that there would be nice.

If you're open to being mobile right now you might consider relocating to work in the EE industry of Linz, Villach or Graz in Austria or the aerospace/defence industry Toulouse in France.

Someone with your experience wouldn't earn much less there and you'd have much lower housing CoL than the big capital cities in southern Germany, and better food and weather.

>Who wants to be manufacturing technician when you can be lifestyle influencer!?

Before influencers people wanted to be actors. It predates the time before Electronics was 'lost' in Europe so thats not a convincing argument.

What you are saying really is that the world enjoys what we have on the backs of inadequately paid production engineers in China. As their demographic crisis does not produce a similar sized replacement generation, that benefit will go away as experts retire and no one replaces them. So one way or another wages will go up meaning inflation will go up and some of those 'lifestyle influencers' will now consider the field because it is a viable career path in terms of pay.

What is really interesting is that worker pay in tier 1 cities in China (e.g. Shenzen) actually is higher than in EU countries such as Slovenia, Bulgaria or Czech republic. Incidentally these countries have a large number of EMS, and we know of quite a few startups that quickly grew production capability to be able to provide electronics assembly.

Kids in china also want to be lifestyle influencers instead of manufacturing technicians

Yeah I didn't say that Chinese people didn't want to go down the same route, infact lifestyle influencers have a better shot there (probably 0.1% better).

There is so much overproduction of engineers that you are possibly working a customer support role with that degree.

Another reason SASS supposedly never took off there, why pay some company when you can just hire from the batch of overproduced STEM graduates and make any software you need.

When I can have an experienced engineer correct my garbage designs for free as part of a manufacturing service you know I am benefiting off of a lucky circumstance that will go away one day: https://youtu.be/ljOoGyCso8s?t=98

Not sure why your post was buried. As the EU does have a lot of rules, but if a product is reasonably made its almost the same cost as the US market entry. Robert Feranec covers a lot of the more obscure EU rules:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTPb7etzOmA

Designs that contain China parts are often immediately disqualified from most trade exemptions. The landed cost can bump gadget retail prices too high in some countries. YMMV =3

You sound like you're stuck in a rut. I don't see any of this.

Where do you live/work that you don't see any of this?

I heard Poland is doing amazing right now, but where I live half my friend group including me has been through layoffs in the past 2-3 years and every day when I open the news, large companies in my country are announcing layoffs or hiring freezes, and small to medium sized ones are announcing insolvencies.

i was looking it up and the 12th biggest pcb manufacture is in austria. which is europa afaik. Its not that dead

"In Leoben befindet sich das weltweite Headquarter von AT&S. Derzeit gibt es drei Produktionslinien, die eine Reihe von verschiedenen ML/HDI Highend-Leiterplatten, Embedded Lösungen für Power Applikationen vor allem im Server Bereich und Cores für die IC-Substratwerke herstellen. Weiteres werden spezielle Technologien für Aviation & Satellites, Industrie, Automotive und den IC-Markt entwickelt und gefertigt.

Mitarbeiter: 1.759 Eröffnung: 1982 Fokus: Automotive, Aviation, Industrial, Medical, Communication, Consumer, Computer, Semicon Ein neues Werk, das derzeit gebaut wird, wird auch die Produktion von IC-Substraten nach Leoben bringen, einschließlich bedeutsamer Kapazitäten für Forschung und Entwicklung. Mit dem neuen Werk werden rund 700 neue Arbeitsplätze geschaffen, wodurch sich die Zahl der Mitarbeiter:innen nahezu verdoppeln wird.

Fabriksgasse 13, 8700 Leoben, Österreich"

https://ats.net/

To be more specific: PCB manufacture anywhere other than China is, given the current economics, so dead. This includes the USA. The only viable alternative is SE asian countries (e.g. Malaysia) but that's not at a comparable scale. The reason is simply economics (e.g. labour costs, equipment, etc).

Really? Most of the electronics I work on get made in the EU. There are a few decent options, even. It's not dead, even if China is much bigger.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com