Robert Charette steps down from IEEE Spectrum after more than two decades as one of the magazine’s most prolific contributors, according to a farewell essay by a Spectrum editor who worked with him for years. Charette, an IEEE Life Senior Member known for writing about software risk and failed technology projects, is leaving the contributing editor role to spend more time on nature photography and fiction.
Charette entered Spectrum’s orbit in 2005, when the magazine was preparing a special report on enterprise software development. The editor said Charette was invited to explain why large software projects so often go sideways. His resulting feature, “Why Software Fails,” became one of his best-known pieces and, according to Spectrum, is still assigned in university engineering courses.
Spectrum described Charette as a “risk ecologist,” a book author, and a specialist in risk management and software engineering. That combination made him useful in a field that prefers tidy diagrams and success stories, then acts surprised when brittle systems meet actual humans.
Why is Robert N. Charette leaving IEEE Spectrum?
According to the Spectrum essay, Charette told the editor he is ending his contributing editor role to concentrate on nature photography and several fiction trilogies. One planned series, titled “The STEM Murders,” features an engineer who becomes a detective.
Charette’s work at Spectrum expanded after 2007, when the magazine’s website editor asked him to launch a regular blog. The Risk Factor ran for more than 10 years and produced 1,750 posts, Spectrum said, tracking hundreds of software and information technology failures.
That run culminated in “Lessons From a Decade of IT Failures,” which won a Jesse H. Neal Award for Best Infographics in 2016, according to Spectrum. The editor added one very on-brand footnote: the winning graphics were made in software that is no longer supported, leaving them unavailable now.
Charette also wrote reported features beyond software project disasters. Spectrum cited his 2024 piece on electronic health records, the 12-part series and ebook “The EV Transition Explained,” and “Automated to Death,” a story about the risks created when automated cyberphysical systems help control aircraft, trains, and cars.
The common thread, according to Charette, was making software visible to readers. In a July conversation recounted by Spectrum, he said people experience the effects of software failure without seeing the underlying cause. “Software is all around us, but we don’t recognize it at all,” Charette said.
Asked which of his Spectrum articles had the largest effect, Charette pointed to his 2013 feature “The STEM Crisis Is a Myth.” He said Spectrum gave him room to challenge the assumption that the United States needed more STEM graduates, an idea he argued had been promoted by employers and universities and pressed onto the IEEE community.
The Spectrum essay frames Charette’s career as a long argument against lazy assumptions in technology. Charette put the rule more sharply in a final risk maxim: “assumptions made are risks accepted.” For a writer who spent years cataloging what happens after systems meet bad premises, that is less a farewell line than a bug report.
This story draws on original reporting from IEEE Spectrum.
