The Man Who Made Software Visible: A Farewell to Tech Journalism's Best Risk Thinker
For more than 20 years, Robert Charette translated software disasters into plain English. Now he's putting down his pen. His parting lesson is worth keeping.
Key points
- Robert N. Charette, an IEEE Life Senior Member and risk-management authority, is retiring from technology journalism after more than two decades as a contributing editor.
- His blog The Risk Factor ran for over 10 years and produced roughly 1,750 posts chronicling software failures worldwide.
- His 2013 article "The STEM Crisis Is a Myth" challenged the widespread belief that the economy needed far more science and engineering graduates.
- Charette is leaving to pursue nature photography and write fiction, including a thriller trilogy called "The STEM Murders".
- His core risk principle: every assumption you make is a risk you have quietly agreed to accept.
Robert Charette does not talk about software the way most people do. Words like "scalable" or "ecosystem" aren't his currency. What he wants to know is what could go wrong, and why anyone assumed it wouldn't.
After more than 20 years writing for IEEE Spectrum (a publication covering electrical engineering and technology), Charette is stepping back. He has seen enough software disasters to fill several libraries, and he'd rather photograph bald eagles in Maryland than attend another post-mortem on a failed government IT project.
Who is Robert Charette and why should you care?
Charette built his career as a risk ecologist, which is exactly what it sounds like: someone who studies the environment in which things go wrong. He ran two management consultancies and spent his spare time writing deeply reported articles that explained, in plain terms, why software projects collapse.
His 2005 article "Why Software Fails" is still assigned in university engineering courses today. The Risk Factor documented nearly 1,750 posts' worth of IT disasters, from hospital systems to self-driving vehicles. A 12-part series on electric vehicle adoption helped ordinary readers understand a shift that will affect anyone who buys a car.
The infographics from his 2016 Jesse H. Neal Award-winning piece are now gone. The software used to create them is no longer supported, and the files are lost.
What was his biggest impact?
Charette singles out "The STEM Crisis Is a Myth", published in 2013, as the article with the widest reach. Employers and universities were loudly insisting that America desperately needed more science, technology, engineering and mathematics graduates. Charette looked at the data and said otherwise.
"Spectrum gave me a platform to question the assumption that we needed more STEM graduates," he told his long-time editor. "People didn't really realize how much of the STEM crisis was a mythology that was perpetuated by employers and the academic community."
That article gave workers a counter-argument at exactly the moment they needed one. Our 31 July story on AI safety certifications picked up a closely related thread: that the labels institutions attach to complex systems often mask the assumptions buried inside them.
What is his parting advice?
Watch your assumptions.
Charette's guiding principle: "Assumptions made are risks accepted." Every time a team builds a system on an untested belief, whether about how users will behave or how reliable a third-party tool will be, they are betting the project on something unchecked.
That applies to AI right now. A company assuming its AI hiring tool is unbiased, or that its customer-service bot will never confuse two accounts, has already accepted those outcomes as possible risks.
Charette is moving on to fiction and nature photography. His eagle photos are, by all accounts, excellent. The shelf of software disasters he documented remains a standing reminder that the systems running our hospitals, our planes, our financial accounts were all built on assumptions nobody bothered to question.
Check your assumptions before you ship.
