So the author says the obvious, what motivates developers is autonomy, mastery and purpose. But he didn't say a single tip on how to overcome demotivation when all these are denied, as is in majority of corporate job positions. Communities won't bring you autonomy, mastery or purpose to your job.
It might bring these things to some side project you are doing, but you are still as shackled by higher ups, as denied of personal growth and as purposeless as it was before joining the community. So money is the only real answer. Money and a threat of being fired because of bad performance, which would result in very bad economic situation.
I have a VP who told me the same thing about autonomy, mastery, and purpose - do you have any material where the three words are used and in more detail?
I haven't read it, but at least for me it seems like common sense that these 3 things have positive effect on motivation.
If you have autonomy over how you complete your tasks for example, you will do it in, according to you, most efficient way, and that will make you feel satisfied. Mastery is from the same desire to be as efficient as you can. Purpose is something different, but you can clearly imagine how much more willing to do your best you are when you know that the thing you do will be seen and used by other people and how it will make people's life easier, for a primitive and simple example.
Compare it to my job - software is bloated, something I myself would never use, our customers are actually forced to used, almost nobody, except the people who earn money from it at the management, likes it, and often you find out that some bug that existed for a year and that completely disabled some functionality was never noticed because no one, not even testers bothered to check those parts of the system. Combine that with heavy restrictions on what can be done, both by time restraints on tasks and by accumulated technical debt that makes any improvements economically not viable, and add the natural tendency of such systems to resist to anything new and you get individuals with gradual decline in motivation over time.
I understand why there's such an ageism "problem" in the industry - the only way to make these companies with these systems afloat is to hire only young people who aren't worn out from these things yet to keep it alive. From my experience, I don't know how it was a couple of decades ago, but it seems like younger and younger people are getting their motivation destroyed by such environments.
You don't often see occupations where people are already sick of their job in general by late twenties to the point of considering switching profession that would pay considerably less.
It might bring these things to some side project you are doing, but you are still as shackled by higher ups, as denied of personal growth and as purposeless as it was before joining the community. So money is the only real answer. Money and a threat of being fired because of bad performance, which would result in very bad economic situation.