In my case it was some OLD device, 10+ years old that never heard of a Gigabit interface and actually would even work on a 10Mbit port. This device will connect correctly on an older gigabit switch but NOT on a more modern Gigabit switch. :-(
Ethernet ports should negotiate speed, but sometimes they fail to do so. Setting speed explicitly is worth trying in this case, but it could be that 1Gb switch simply doesn't support 10Mb or this support is buggy, because the vendor didn't bother with testing a brand new switch against 20 years old technology. For old hardware cable type is also important: crosscable can't be used between old NIC and the switch.
But I wouldn't call it "electrical incompatibility". It is more like a protocol backward compatibility problem:)