Not the person who used the term, but I kind of wish I had been. It's excellent. At FAANG-ish companies where "impact" is the key to promotion, there's an inevitable tendency for engineers to prefer working on things that are highly visible like starting new projects or adding new features, vs. things that are highly useful like stability, testing, or code quality. Most internally promoted E6s or above got that way by initiating multiple projects, then dumping them on others when they've served their perf-review-enhancing purpose. "Perf farming" is as good a term as I've seen for it.
When you get promoted, they tend to move you to different projects (that need different resources at founding time than the operations folks that have experience scaling up)
