[trough]

There are some concerns that the internationally recognized image of Saxony as an extremely xenophobic region will deter international talent. The main problem isn’t staffing the plant with human assembly and packaging drones but having engineers and IT join permanently after production starts. Rural saxony is not a place where you want to live if even your last name isn’t deemed ‘white’ or ‘German’ enough. And after years of cultivating this image it started to work against the best interests of the more rural parts of the region: brain drain galore and no sane person seeking work in a future proof place to build a life would come.

[sillysaurusx]

Translation: there are a lot of talented Asians, and we’re worried they won’t want to live there. Is that accurate?

It seems like most of the US has this problem. And yet rural IT always seems to find a way. I’m in Lake Saint Louis with gigabit symmetric fiber, which is a dream. We were backwater for awhile, but post COVID a lot of talent can be sourced remotely, at least for software.

Is a fab really so regional? I could imagine them having a team in Taiwan who they work with remotely. But I know very little about fab plants, and it sounds like you have a better idea of their engineering and IT requirements.

I used to work at Groq, a hardware company, and we were fully remote. So I’ve seen this work in practice. (It’s a tossup whether Groq will succeed, but that’s a separate conversation.)

[sho_hn]

> It seems like most of the US has this problem.

The US still benefits from latent good marketing/rep in the 80s/90s, and projection of military power in decades past. For example, until relatively recently (the Trump era and especially how it ended disillusioned many), South Koreans still looked to the US as their model of the developed world. If you'd send your children anywhere to get educated or marry, it would be there. Inner benchmarks were done against the US. The rose-tinted glasses were enough to convince many to move without checking too carefully what the place they'd be moving to would actually be like.

This is changing, and more recently more attention is being paid to Europe, partially because the national conversation has shifted more toward quality of life, birthrate problems, aging population, etc. and there's more interest in social systems, healthcare, family planning support and so on.

Still, Koreans have a lot of memes about this or that place in Europe being racist in this or that way (and of course, quite lot of it is true), so it remains a big impediment.

[telotortium]

Let me know when companies actually start pulling out of Saxony (not blog posts from randos - most people don't care as much about politics as the people who wrote those blog posts do).

[qwytw]

> Saxony as an extremely xenophobic region

That seems like a 'slight' overstatement. Saxony is also full of crypto-communists (third highest polling state for Linke)...

> The main problem isn’t staffing the plant with human assembly and packaging

So why on earth are these companies building they are fabs there instead of some other place in Germany? I mean they can't be that stupid to not understand all of this?