The Workplace Will Never Be a Democracy

One of the most persistent ideas I’ve heard in my decades in IT is that we geeks want democracy at work. Surprisingly, I’ve heard it from managers and executives as often as I have from front-line geeks.
But when you scratch the surface, you see that we don’t really want democracy at all. We want a lot of other things related to what we value and how we’d like our workplaces to operate. Somehow this gets shorthanded to “We want democracy,” but what we really want are much more sp