His technique creates a psychological reward ("I just deployed my server with my feet, bwahaha this programming gig is fun") for a behavior which he wants to incentivize, believing it to have direct advantages for the business.

I think we're finally coming out of the Stone Age of user psychology and realizing that things like "make the user feel like they've just accomplished something awesome" actually matter. We're not quite there yet on designing our own interfaces. I applaud experiments into this (although the pointy-headed metric monkey in me wonders whether "deploys per day" is a good productivity metric or not -- egads, bad stuff happens when you incentivize poor proxies of performance).