Why I think choosing IAS as a career path is a bad option..?

I don't have anything against IASs but also nothing in favor of them as well. I do acknowledge that the post of an IAS is considered extremely successful and the greatest thing by many but certainly not by me. In this article, I'll try to point out the fundamental flaws of choosing to prepare for the IAS exam in the most unbiased way possible. For an apt comparison, I will take a developer or researcher in a company like Google, Apple, or Microsoft.

Let's break down the details of why choosing to prepare for the IAS exam is not a good idea.

Skillsets: The skillset one gains while preparing for IAS is almost useless in the practical world and personal life. The gained skillset is largely useless as it can't be used to land any other job in other sectors or countries. The work assigned to an IAS office is of two types: administrative or handling the problems of poor people. I do get that one might feel good helping poor people but in no way does that means that one is operating at their full mental potential. Almost every government office runs similarly and it can be run virtually by anyone, you don't need to be super smart to run one.  One thing about which I've always wondered is, how knowing about the Harappan civilization or who won how many gold medals in the RIO Olympics is going to help an IAS office to do their job with efficacy. All it does is change one into a fact-checking machine and we all know that there is no way one can memorize all the facts. It would be better if they learned how to solve problems systematically and logically. When we do research we don't need to know by heart every paper, all we need to understand is, how the smaller pieces fit in the bigger picture rather than memorizing random dates and names. 

Perseverance, and hard work are the most generic skills one can talk about in an interview, and by the time the prep ends, most are in a distressed state, incapable of doing anything great. There is so much scientific evidence, that studying more beyond a certain hours do not create smarter individual. All the great men and women who changed the society were not hogging up all day long. There is a reason why no one creates tech like GPT from India and yet the same Indians when move outside create wonders. Go and study in an European or American university, bachelor level students are doing better research than Ph.D. in India, and the reason is simple, the curriculum is not designed to pressurize you, but to keep you motivated to innovate and build technologies. 

Salary: The salary they earn is minimal compared to what one can earn in big corporates. At best, they can make 1 lakhs as a young IAS with everything included but many private jobs can easily pay a much better salary than this. Making good money opens up so many doors to build better things and create more impact and this is only possible when people earn way beyond their sustenance. A senior dev in Google makes over 50 LPA and in USA over 250k USD. That's a lot of money to quickly achieve financial freedom and pursue other dreams. In IASs salary barely will you be able send your kids to the best university in the world.

Working conditions: Working conditions are rarely good, you will never get an office as good as Google's office. The places where you work are often villages, you can't do shit there even with money. You can't go to good bars and cafes. The dating game is almost zero. This might be irrelevant once you get old but for a lot of unmarried guys, this is what life is about, having fun and be out there in the world. Also, rarely do you get to meet your best friends because you are posted in some remote part of the country. I still don't get why working beyond office hours is considered good. Indians are really depressed in general because there is no clear demarcation of personal and work life.

Work pressure and colleagues: Often, one has to work in an unsafe, unethical, and corrupt environment. Dealing with corrupt officials and ministers becomes part of your life. Often political seniority puts an immense amount of stress and pressure. Even in the worst of situations, one can't move to other places or companies as they don't have any marketable skillset. Also, there is almost no scope for intellectual growth by learning from your peers because almost none of them are intellectual.

No intellectual growth: Since you rarely work with high-caliber people there are only a handful of opportunities where you can grow mentally. Most of the work an IAS does is often mentally stressful and not innovative. There are a few examples of innovation here and there but largely it is just redundant paperwork. One rarely get a chance to discuss greats like Einstein or Rene Descartes.

No fun: Everything has a proper time and getting those things later in life is no fun. They don't get any opportunities to see the outside world except for IFS. In the younger stage of one's career, one never gets a chance to study from the greatest of minds or to experience what it is like to invent something. Preparing for IAS often leads to losing all your college friends as well, by the time one clears the exam virtually no one is left in their friend circle even to celebrate their victory. 

As one represents a district they have to be always careful of their behavior in public. As an IT employee, you can go and hit on a girl in a pub, and drink till you puke but never as an IAS. And to add to that, there are always policemen surrounding them, making their personal lives even worse. One might get a lot of yes men around them but hardly any actual intimacy. One can't take leaves easily or ignore their official duties to hang out with their girlfriend/boyfriend. Please don't tell me that a 27-year-old IAS officer doesn't think about these things. It's just that they are put in a position where all of this is almost impossible due to the image they have to portray. 

Serving the country: If you tell me that people do this to serve their country and to challenge themselves. I will just say bullshit. Hardly anyone is that patriotic, everyone at their core is selfish and serving one's country and all just sounds good to hear nothing else. Given an option between 25k and 1 lakh, almost everyone will choose the 1 lakh job. People go to IAS for respect, power, security, good houses, and other allowances, not for the purpose of serving the country.

Governnment Scam: The government knows that it can't provide enough jobs to youth, so it keeps fooling the youth into preparing for an exam where more than 99% will fail and yet keep thinking of themselves as aspirant instead of jobless with 0 contribution to economy for 4-5 years. And by the time the students are done with their attempts, they are in no position to create a movement against the government and ask them for a job. All they can do is humbly accept any and every job that is thrown at their direction with no complaints. 

Lost capabilities: Because one always knows that now they are permanent employees, their motivation to work also reduces, and they don't improve much in any sense. The amount of work done by any state machinery is far less efficient compared to any good corporation. It's just the passing of files and signing of tenders and god knows how many other redundant processes. There's almost no incentive to perform better. Let me make an apt analogy to what an IAS does and what an actual researcher does. An IAS is a person who repairs the puncture of all the vehicles in a city and feels good about themselves. But what a true researcher will do is that he/she will develop tires that will never get punctured. I'm not saying that a repair guy is not needed or useless, it's just that repair work can be done by an average Joe but to invent a puncture-proof tire one needs to be extremely intelligent and hard-working. An IAS is not solving any real problem all he/she does is check whether the proposed system is working correctly or not. And to check the apt working of the system one doesn't need to be extremely brilliant or even hard working. No one can deny that a good researcher has a much larger impact on society compared to an IAS officer working at the district level along with other personal benefits. 

Mental Effect: All the above-mentioned downsides are if one has cleared the IAS, and if one doesn't clear it then it is hell. 5 years of prime youth wasted, almost zero scopes of romance, no money, no decent job, jealousy that your friends are doing better than you, depression, anxiety, and other mental health problems. If one works even 50% of what one does for IAS preparation, they are almost guaranteed to be a decent researcher with a good salary, reputation, and ton of really good experiences. I'm positive that a few hundred people at Google have brought more positive effects and power to the poor than all the IAS officers combined. An IAS contribution is not much different than traffic policemen, we just need someone at that post that's it. They don't need to be necessarily very smart, intelligent, or hard-working. Post of IAS is a necessity but not great by any means. And if someone truly wants to see why IAS is nothing more than just a necessity, look at other countries, people don't bust their asses to reach an admin position. I've personally seen how young people are running the European Union, living a comfortable life, yet creating a more positive impact on their population. Now if any of you give the argument that India not have enough resources, then we need strategists, and businessmen creating those resources, certainly not a large chunk of youth wasting their time for exam preparation. The entire government is being run by fairly normal people and they do much better jobs than our IAS officers. IAS doesn't have almost any power to bring an actual change, all they do is keep a check on the proposed system.

Well, this is what my observation looks like, I'm fully confident that I'm biased because of my own experiences yet, I would like to know what other thinks. A few of you might say that