I could not disagree more strongly with the notion that democracy should be the mechanism by which businesses should be run.
Democracy says which choices we're okay with, but businesses and people should totally have the autonomy to decide which of the allowed choices to go with.
"Forcing people into jobs they don't want, working on things they don't want, forbidding tpem to talk about it, all because they need money to eat and have a roof" is not letting people do their thing.
The whole point of a democracy is that the people are the priority; everything else is a tool to further the people's lives. Companies must be tools to make the lives of people, both outside and inside, better. Otherwise when it decides to do what it wants with no counter-power it is not furthering democracy.
Remember: businesses are not people.
Furthermore, the fact that you are not free to act with impunity, and do not have the right to demand that others indulge your preferences and suppress their own, is not in of itself anti-democratic. In a free society other people also have the right to structure their affairs as they see fit. And you have the right to choose to engage with them, or not.
What you are doing is treating some of those consequences as "force" and others as not.
For example, if you need money to pay your property tax, you need to earn that money somehow. Or face the consequence of losing your home. No one is forcing you to stay in that home, leave, but that's pretty brutal thing to not call "forced." But you can see paying property tax is optional as long as you accept the consequences.
So if you aim to have financial security with a median lifestyle, or even better (e.g. single income), that's easy to do in software. Chasing maximum money is a choice. It seems pretty out of touch when looking at any other job to use "well they need to pay the bills" to excuse behavior in this field.
How you do so is up to you. If you want to start a commune, go for it. If you prefer to work at FAANG, that’s cool too. We are very lucky to find ourselves in a society where we have this choice, and we should be careful about the extent to which we impinge on others’ ability to choose as well
As another poster correctly pointed out, no one is forcing you to specifically support your own survival at Google. People choose to work at Google because of greed and a desire for prestige, and because it is much easier to benefit from what already exists than it is to create something yourself. This is all perfectly rational, but framing the issue in lamentations about “force” and “democracy” is nothing but crocodile tears.
Plus if property taxes and so forth really were the issue, there is already a democratic remedy for the problem. Taxes are instituted by our society democratically, and they can be removed democratically as well. But I suspect that this would not rectify the OP’s concern, because it’s not really about democracy or freedom. Instead it’s about greed and envy for what others have that they do not.
The truth is most people when they say "I am forced to do X" there is really an implicit unstated "So I can have a, b and c".
The fact that you value a, b and c differently from the person does not mean it was not forced from their perspective.
I basically agree with you about the phenomenon you’re pointing out, so please don’t take this as overly salty, but:
Just because I believe that I can fly doesn’t make it so. So too is true of people believing that they are “forced” to work at Google, no matter what they might perceive.
Now, if you want this argument to be complete, you also need to specify what doesn't count as "forced" in your opinion. Otherwise you can pick any arbitrary human interaction and deem it as "forced" and you end up with some pretty weird consequences.
In this particular case, you think a Google engineer was essentially doing forced labor. Google being Google and not McDonalds, it would follow that all or the vast majority of salaried employees are doing forced labor. Did I get this right? Where exactly do you draw the line?
What you need judge two things, the validity of the consequences avoided and goals which is subjective and whether there are alternatives to the same goals that have acceptable consequences.
This is not the point of democracy. The point of democracy is that the priorities of the people are the priority.
For instance, it is entirely possible to have a democracy that agrees that we should perform human sacrifice once a month, so long as the majority of its constituents agree that that's their priority.
Democracy provides a vehicle for a populace to enshrine their values into law. It does not define those values (such as valuing human flourishing or freedom of choice), that's up to us to build on top of it.
We become ruled by socialopathic oligarchy, in the form of corporations instead of a few individuals. And no one executive can be held accountable because they're large organizations that diffuse responsibility.
Once I was a young conservative who thought these ideas were crazy Hollywood tropes. As I get older I see the pattern manifest more and more in the USA.
I believe you are talking about "representative democracy" specificly. Besides from this and "Direct democracy", there seems to be dozens of more types, according to Wikipedia.