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I'm not sure what the technical term for this is, or if there even a technical term, but I find that a lot of baristas seem to skip this step. They go right from the grind to the tamp. To me this would seem to cause a lot of poor extractions. When it's not even, part of the "puck" is going to end up denser than others, and the the water under pressure is going to force its way through the less dense portion creating a over-extraction on part of it and an under-extraction on another part. If you examine the puck afterwards you'll see that parts of it are damper than others. If there is another way to look at this I'm not sure what it is.