The Man Who Made Software Visible: A Farewell to Tech Journalism's Best Risk Thinker
For 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. He does not use words like "scalable" or "ecosystem". He asks: what could go wrong, and why did we assume it wouldn't?
After more than 20 years writing for IEEE Spectrum (a publication covering electrical engineering and technology), Charette is stepping back. He is 70-something, he has seen enough software disasters to fill several libraries, and he would now 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. His blog The Risk Factor documented nearly two decades of IT disasters, from hospital systems that lost patient data to self-driving systems that made fatal decisions. His 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, ironically, are now gone. The software used to create them is no longer supported. The files are lost.
What was his biggest impact?
Charette says "The STEM Crisis Is a Myth", published in 2013, had the widest reach. At the time, employers and universities were loudly insisting that America desperately needed more science, technology, engineering and mathematics graduates. Charette looked at the data and said: not so fast.
"People didn't really realize how much of the STEM crisis was a mythology that was perpetuated by employers and the academic community," he told his long-time editor during one of their Friday morning calls.
That article gave workers, students and parents a counter-argument at exactly the moment they needed one.
What is his parting advice?
Simple. Watch your assumptions.
Charette's guiding principle is this: "Assumptions made are risks accepted." Every time a team builds a system on an untested belief, whether that belief is about how users will behave, how markets will move, or how reliable a third-party tool will be, they are betting the project on something they have not checked.
That applies to AI systems right now. A company that assumes its AI hiring tool is unbiased, or that its AI customer-service bot will never confuse two accounts, has already accepted those outcomes as possible risks.
Charette is moving on to fiction and photography. His eagle photos are, by all accounts, excellent. But the shelf of software disasters he documented is a standing reminder that the systems running our hospitals, our planes and our financial accounts were all, at some point, built on assumptions nobody bothered to question.
Check your assumptions before you ship.
