7 Things IEEE Spectrum Learned From Two Decades of Fridays With Bob Charette
Over two decades, Bob Charette's work as a risk ecologist revealed software's hidden flaws through blogs, articles, and a long-standing editorial friendship.
Source material: spectrum.ieee.org
A risk ecologist's mission: make software legible
Charette built his entire body of work around one observation: software is all around us, but we don't recognize it at all. "You can't see software, you can't touch it, you can't taste it," he told his Spectrum editor. "You may feel the consequences of software failure, but you never see the reason itself." His goal across two decades of IEEE Spectrum coverage was to make complex software systems legible to the engineers and decision-makers who depend on them — a mission that started with his 2005 article "Why Software Fails," still assigned in university engineering courses today. In practice, that meant cataloguing failures at industrial scale: The Risk Factor blog alone produced more than 1,750 posts over ten years, each one dissecting a specific software breakdown so that readers could see the pattern before it reached their own systems. His 2013 feature "The STEM Crisis Is a Myth" showed the same mechanism applied to workforce data, stripping away an assumption the industry had accepted for years. When he described himself as a risk ecologist rather than a risk manager, the distinction was operational: risk cannot be eliminated, only understood in context, and understanding requires making the invisible visible first.
"The STEM Crisis Is a Myth" challenged an industry-wide assumption
In 2013, Charette published what he considered his most impactful work. Spectrum had given him a platform to question the assumption that the world needed more STEM graduates. Much of the perceived STEM workforce shortage was a mythology perpetuated by employers and the academic community and foisted on the IEEE community. The work reframed a debate that had been treated as settled for years, executing Charette's signature move: taking an assumption everyone had accepted and tracing it back to its unexamined roots. The mechanism was straightforward — challenge the numbers, expose who benefits from the narrative, and let the reader see what was hidden in plain sight. Before this, IEEE members and the wider engineering public had little reason to question the shortage claim; afterward, the assumption carried an asterisk. Charette's risk maxim, "assumptions made are risks accepted," was not an abstraction in this case. The STEM crisis assumption had shaped hiring policy, university funding, and immigration advocacy for years. Questioning it was an act of risk mitigation at the industry scale.
The Risk Factor blog chronicled software debacles
When Charette's Spectrum editor became the website editor in 2007, Charette was the first contributor tapped to launch a regular blog. The Risk Factor ran for more than 10 years, cataloguing software failures across industries — healthcare, transportation, finance, government, defense. Each post worked the same way: take a specific breakdown, trace it back to the assumptions that made it possible, and leave the reader with a pattern they could apply to their own systems. The blog's culminating piece, "Lessons From a Decade of IT Failures," won a Jesse H. Neal Award for Best Infographics in 2016. The infographics were created in a software package that is no longer supported and are now lost to bit rot — a failure mode Charette himself would have recognized. The blog's archive is a ten-year longitudinal study of software risk at the societal level, documenting how the same categories of failure recur across sectors and across the shift from on-premise to cloud, from waterfall to agile, from human-coded to machine-assisted.
"Automated to Death" exposed the automation paradox in transportation
Charette's reporting on cyberphysical systems — the software that pilots planes, trains, and automobiles — documented a deadly pattern: the more automated a system becomes, the less prepared its human operators are to intervene when automation fails. He traced concrete incidents across transportation modes, showing how the automation paradox manifests in the real-world systems that move people. In aviation, pilots trained to monitor automation lose the manual skills needed when that automation disconnects unexpectedly. In rail, operators watching screens for hours are cognitively unprepared for the seconds that demand instant human judgment. In automobiles, driver-assistance systems create a false sense of security that reduces vigilance below the threshold required when the system reaches its operational limits. The mechanism is consistent: automation removes the human from the loop just long enough to atrophy the very competence the human needs when the loop breaks. His editor called it a personal favorite, and the reason is structural — it makes the invisible failure mode visible by showing the same pattern across three industries that do not normally talk to each other.
The EV Transition Explained ran 12 parts and became an e-book
Charette produced a deeply reported series examining the technical, economic, and logistical challenges of shifting from internal combustion to electric vehicles. The work spanned 12 installments and was compiled into an e-book, offering a level of detail on battery supply chains, grid capacity, manufacturing retooling, and workforce implications that few publications attempted in a single sustained effort. Each installment traced a specific bottleneck — where the lithium comes from, how the grid will handle simultaneous charging loads, what happens to factory workers whose skills do not transfer — and left the reader with the actual numbers rather than projections. The series moved Charette's method beyond software failure into a domain where systems thinking and risk analysis applied with the same force. It was deeply reported work: twelve parts, an e-book, and a scope that required following supply chains across continents and policy debates across administrations.
Electronic health records got the Charette treatment
Charette applied his systems-level scrutiny to healthcare IT, examining how electronic health records have reshaped clinical workflows, patient safety, and physician burden. The work followed the same template as his best: taking a system that most people encounter but few understand, and tracing the gap between its promise and its actual operational reality. EHRs designed to reduce medical errors instead created new categories of error — copy-paste propagation, alert fatigue, and interface designs that bury critical information under layers of clicks. Physicians reported spending more time entering data than seeing patients, and the systems that were supposed to improve coordination often fragmented it by forcing clinicians to speak to screens instead of to each other. His method was consistent: identify the assumption (EHRs improve care), measure the gap between that assumption and the operational reality, and leave the reader with enough concrete evidence to question the next claim they encounter.
Friday mornings with an editor became a more than 20-year friendship
The collaboration began when a 2005 special report on enterprise software brought Charette and his Spectrum editor together. They settled into a rhythm of Friday morning conversations about the growing ubiquity of software that lasted more than 20 years — a cadence that produced a dozen major features and an e-book. The Friday calls were where Charette tested ideas before committing them to print, where his editor pushed back on assumptions, and where the two of them mapped the expanding territory of software risk in real time. Charette told his editor he was retiring from contributing to focus on nature photography and to write fictional trilogies — including one called "The STEM Murders" featuring an engineer-turned-detective and his rabbi, a nod to the mentorship relationship that had shaped both their careers. The rabbi framing came from a senior editor who, 25 years earlier, had advised Charette's editor to find someone who could mentor her in how EEs approach problems and evaluate potential solutions. Charette was that someone, and the Friday mornings were the mechanism.
Where this came from. This breakdown is based on source material published at spectrum.ieee.org. Images above are used with the credits shown beneath each one.