His full blog series on this explains it better. To my understanding, this “ranking” is only for maintenance tasks. He also sets “maintenance” at 8-12 hours maximum per week. So it’s just an interesting way of making a game out of doing potentially not-fun maintenance tasks.

He also explains that the developers pick their own maintenance tasks for the week, so it’s an additional way to make people accountable for having decent estimates.

When I look at it through that lens I don’t find it nearly as off putting.