I once had a customly designed project for an external client of a web-development company were I was technical lead and the sales guy who sold it to the customer without ever consulting us about it had the project management responsability.

On the very first day the guy got me, the junior developer and the designer together for the project launch meeting and started saying how we would have to work extra to make it fit his (ridiculously short) deadlines and I just said “No, it’s not at all possible to fullfill those deadlines so that’s not going to happen” and when he tried to argue with “what about the client” I replied that “You came up with those estimates and gave them to the client without even talking to us, the experts in that domain, so managing the fallout with the client from that is your problem not ours”.

I fondly remember all that because of the transition from downtrodden and unhappy to absolute happiness visible on the face of the junior developer when, after the sales guy / project manager gave us the “work extra hard” spiel I (as the tech lead) replied with “No, that’s not going to happen”.

(Ultimatelly the project took twice as long as the sales guy’s estimates)

The whole “putting the cart in front of the oxen” (as we say in my country) of this meme reminded me of that one (and that memory invariably puts a smile on my face).