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This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free!The Worst Engineer in the RoomMy salary doubled. My confidence tanked. That’s what happened when I had just joined a five-person startup in San Francisco in my third year as a software engineer. Two of the founders had been recognized in Forbes 30 Under 30. T

Gerard “Gus” Gaynor, a long-serving IEEE volunteer and former engineering director at 3M, died on 9 March. The IEEE Life Fellow was 104.Readers of The Institute might remember Gus from his 2022 profile: “From Fixing Farm Equipment to Becoming a Director at 3M.” Just last year, he and I coauthored twoar

ZTASP is a mission-scale assurance and governance platform designed for autonomous systems operating in real-world environments. It integrates heterogeneous systems—including drones, robots, sensors, and human operators—into a unified zero-trust architecture. Through Secure Runtime Assurance (SRTA) and Secure Spatio-Temporal Reasoning (SSTR), ZTASP continuously verifies system integrity, enforces safety constraints, and enables resilient operation even under degraded conditions.ZTASP has progressed beyond conceptual design, with operational validation at Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 7 in mission critical environments. Core components, including Saluki secure flight controllers, have reached TRL8 and are deployed in customer systems. While initially developed for high-consequence mission environments, the

By many estimates, quantum computers will need millions of qubits to realize their potential applications in cybersecurity, drug development, and other industries. The problem is, anyone who has wanted to simultaneously control millions of a certain kind of qubits has run into the problem of trying to control millions of laser beams. That’s exactly the challenge that was faced by scientists working on the MITRE Quantum Moonshot project, which brought together scientists from MITRE, MIT, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Sandia National Laboratories. The s

Kyle McGinley graduated from high school in 2018 and, like many teenagers, he was unsure what career he wanted to pursue. Recuperating from a sports injury led him to consider becoming a physical therapist for athletes. But he was skilled at repairing cars and fixing things around the house, so he thought about becoming an engineer, like his father.McGinley, who lives in Sellersville, Pa., took some classes at Montgomery County Community College in Blue Bell, while also working. During his years at the college, he took a variety of courses and was drawn to electrical engineering and computing, he

Artificial intelligence harbors an enormous energy appetite. Such constant cravings are evident in the hefty carbon footprint of the data centers behind the AI boom and the steady increase over time of carbon emissions from training frontier AI models.No wonder big tech companies are warming up to

Picture a highway with networked autonomous cars driving along it. On a serene, cloudless day, these cars need only exchange thimblefuls of data with one another. Now picture the same stretch in a sudden snow squall: The cars rapidly need to share vast amounts of essential new data about slippery roads, emergency braking, and changing conditions.These two very different scenarios involve vehicle networks with very different computational loads. Eavesdropping on network traffic using a ham radio, you wouldn’t hear much static on the line on a clear, calm day. On the other hand, sudden whiteout conditions on a wintry day would sound like a cacophony of sensor readings and network chatter.Normally this cacophony would mean two

In late-stage testing of a distributed AI platform, engineers sometimes encounter a perplexing situation: every monitoring dashboard reads “healthy,” yet users report that the system’s decisions are slowly becoming wrong.Engineers are trained to recognize failure in familiar ways: a service crashes, a sensor stops responding, a constraint violation triggers a shutdown. Something breaks, and the system tells you. But a growing class of software failures looks very different. The system keeps running, logs appear normal, and monitoring dashboards stay green. Yet the system’s behavior quietly drifts away from what it was designed to do.This pattern i

While browsing our website a few weeks ago, I stumbled upon “How and When the Memory Chip Shortage Will End” by Senior Editor Samuel K. Moore. His analysis focuses on the current DRAM shortage caused by AI hyperscalers’ ravenous appetite for memory, a major constraint on the speed at which large language models run. Moore provides a clear explanation of the shortage, particularly for high bandwidth memory (HBM).As we and the rest of the tech media have documented, AI is a resource hog. AI electricity consumption could account for up to 12 percent of all U.S. power by 2028.

Building the next generation of robots for successful integration into our homes, offices, and factories is more than just solving the hardware and software problems – we also need to understand how they will be perceived and how they can work effectively with people in those spaces. aspect_ratio