Richard Morgan's Engineering Leadership Blog

Welcome to my website! I am an engineering leader in San Francisco. I write about engineering leadership, management, and AI. In my past role, I was an Engineering Director. After 20 years of full-time work, I am currently on a 6-12 month sabbatical, pursuing startup ideas and exploring AI while I discover what I want to pursue next.

Richard's Recent Articles

  • Common Sense is a Red Flag

    June 12, 2025 by Richard Morgan
    I used to regularly advocate for common sense ideas. Then I read a book that completely changed my perspective. It opened with this line: Webster defines common sense as “the unreflective opinions of ordinary people.” Now alarm bells go off in my head every time I hear that phrase. It’s...

Quick Updates

  • Cleaning up some cobwebs on this site...

    Posted by Richard on

Software Engineering Leadership Handbook

“The most important thing is that you develop your own principles and ideally write them down, especially if you are working with others.” - Ray Dalio

“Everyone makes the mistake of looking at decisions like it’s the first problem of this sort… If you have principles, you can learn to think more clearly and communicate better the ‘Why’.” - Ray Dalio

I started writing down my principles in 2021 after reading Principles by Ray Dalio. These principles are based on a combination of professional experience and extensive reading and are intended to serve as a guide for how engineering leaders should act in common scenarios to optimize their organization. If you have any feedback, disagreement, or suggestions, please open a GitHub issue and help me refine these principles.

Since these began as personal notes on my computer, I was not disciplined about noting sources as I encountered ideas. Over time, I will identify and cite sources where possible.

Most of my thoughts here are related to software development, leadership, investing, and psychology. I also have dozens of book notes that I will be sharing as time allows.

This is a very rough draft, and I have hundreds more notes to incorporate as I have over time. As a recovering perfectionist, I would prefer to keep this private until perfect, but I am pursuing progress over perfection.

I have a number of complaints with the current version of this engineering handbook. Enough so that I’m tempted to remove it altogether. Some frustrations:

  • It presents things as universal absolutes when many of them are contextual. It fails to differentiate clearly.
  • Many of these principles read as pop science rather than explaining the thinking behind them and sharing the real life lessons learned the hard way.
  • It intermixes subjective opinions based on my own personal values rather than presenting universal baseline recommendations based on objective tradeoffs.
  • It provides a lense to how I’ve approached problems in my past orgs, but that may not apply to how I would approach them in future orgs under different conditions.

Moving Forward:

  • I want to develop a rubric explaining common constraints faced by various types of companies: solo founders, early stage startups, mid-sized teams, and mature organizations, and engineering organizations
  • I want to focus on the tradeoffs in light of these business constraints.
  • I want to explained why it makes various recommendations and when these recommendations would not be helpful.

Updating this site has been a low priority for me, but one of these days I plan to overhaul it significantly, because this frankly is not production-worthy.

Who is Richard Morgan?

Unfortunately, having a super generic name like “Richard Morgan” has its challenges from an SEO perspective, and I am working on improving from page 7 in Google for my own name. While browsing for my own site, I discovered some extremely notable and talented Richard Morgans out there.

For disambiguation purposes, I am not:

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Richard Morgan is an engineering leader in San Francisco, CA. He writes about engineering leadership, management, and AI.

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