Mediocrity!!

It was supposed to be a day spent in relief,after completing the end term exams with only one project demonstration remaining.I hardly slept the previous night despite being sleep deprived for over a week.By around 5 in the morning, I had managed to complete the remaining work in my project and went to bed, with the intention of speaking to my prof later in the morning to get some feedback about the work.A careless mistake while demonstrating resulted in unexpectedly bad result from my program. So the prof decided to take a look at the code to identify the cause of the anomaly. Having taken one look at it, came a most surprising comment," There is no good in just getting a code from somewhere, you gotta understand how it works atleast, before demonstrating it."

This comment shocked me !!Being a mediocre programmer, i usually start my coding work, from a template and build on it, seldom starting any programming from scratch.However, this was one occasion where i wrote every line of code, with meticulous commenting and following almost every trivial Software Engineering ritual, maintaining the date of creation of code, date of modification, versioning scheme, a few lines of introductory comments about how to run the code, etc.[This was something that this very prof espoused in class saying,"maintaining good documentation is very important, even if your code is not working, these rituals must be followed-will help in debugging and maintaining the code later on!"]
This sort of organised method of working is probably best confined to speeches and not practice and was probably not expected of us..
If any work which is done with diligence can be met with such reproach, no wonder we are content to do amateurish work and be satisfied with it, coz that is what is expected of us. Going the extra mile to do things in an organised manner only lands us into trouble, resuting in comments from well meaning peers," Why did you need to do it that well, they will obviously suspect that you flicked it from somewhere".
I guess, there is some truth in these comments afterall.
My first time doing a decent programming job and i get this!!I can only say "Idu yentha lokavayyah" where mediocrity is the norm and hardwork and effort count for nothing and leads to suspicion.

Lesson from this incident: NEVER FOLLOW SE practices. If you do, then you will land in trouble. I always knew that the profs were only Bull Shitting us in the weekly 4 hours of SE lectures every week .But now, speaking from experience, i can be certain!!