Where has the practice of sending screen shots as source code come from?

[Tim Delaney]

On 29 January 2018 at 02:04, Steven D'Aprano <
steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:

> I'm seeing this annoying practice more and more often. Even for trivial
> pieces of text, a few lines, people post screenshots instead of copying
> the code.


I don't tend to see this from programmers I work with, but I'm constantly
having to deal with support tickets where the person raising the ticket put
a screenshot of something like a console or grid output of an SQL tool or
even a logfile opened in a text editor ... Even worse, usually they'll
paste the screenshot into a Word document first (which then causes
difficulties to view the screenshot due to page width, etc).

I had one case the other day where they'd taken a screenshot of some of the
columns of the output of an SQL query and pasted it into a Word document. I
specifically asked them not to do this, explained that the tool they were
using could export to CSV and that would be much more useful as I could
search it, etc. I offered to walk them through how to do the CSV export.
And I requested that they send me the entire output (all columns) of the
SQL output.

I got back a Word document containing about 10 screenshots where they'd
apparently taken a screenshot, moved the horizontal scrollbar one screen,
taken another screenshot, etc.

These are support people who are employed by the company I'm contracted to.
Doesn't matter how often I try to train them otherwise, this type of thing
keeps happening.

BTW: I have nothing to do with the final persistence format of the data,
but in practice I've had to learn the DB schema and stored procedures for
everything I support. Strangely the DB team don't have to learn my parts ...

Tim Delaney