My 20-Year Friday Call With Bob Charette: A Mentor's Legacy
We fell into a rhythm almost immediately. Friday mornings, coffee in hand, we'd talk for an hour about everything from the creeping ubiquity of software to the latest IT catastrophe splashed across the news. When I became website editor in 2007, Bob was the first person I asked to start a blog — back when "blog" still felt like a strange word to say out loud. The Risk Factor ran for over a decade and produced more than 1,750 posts. His decade-long chronicle of software debacles later became "Lessons From a Decade of IT Failures," which won a Neal Award for Best Infographics in 2016. The twist? Those award-winning graphics were built in a software package that's now unsupported, so they've been swallowed by bit rot. Bob would appreciate that irony.
He was never a one-note writer. Between running two consultancies and raising his daughters, he wrote deeply reported features that ranged widely: last year's deep dive into electronic health records, the 12-part series The EV Transition Explained, and my personal favorite, "Automated to Death" — a chilling look at what happens when automation paradoxes meet the cyberphysical systems that fly planes and drive trains.
His mission, he told me one July morning, was to make software visible. "Software is all around us, but we don't recognize it at all," he said. "You can't see it, touch it, or taste it. You feel the consequences of failure, but you never see the reason itself." That's the spirit behind every article he contributed — a real-world, hands-on effort to demystify the invisible systems running our lives.
When Bob announced he was stepping back from editing to focus on nature photography and a series of fictional trilogies (one starring an engineer-turned-detective who has his own rabbi), I asked which Spectrum piece he considered most impactful. He didn't hesitate: "The STEM Crisis Is a Myth," from 2013. "Spectrum gave me a platform to question the assumption that we needed more STEM graduates," he said. "Until then, people didn't realize how much of that crisis was mythology, perpetuated by employers and academia."
Bob made a career out of questioning assumptions. His final advice to me, as our Friday chats wound down, was simple: the best way to mitigate risk is to stop making careless assumptions in the first place. "My main risk maxim," he said, "is that assumptions made are risks taken." I still think about that every time I'm tempted to skim past a hidden dependency — and every Friday when I miss his call.