Vantaggi
On Shift work means you only work half the year. You almost never have to work overtime as a process engineer unless you want to You do not receive calls at all hours of the night If you are willing the rotate the time you are awake weekly and sleep a little less, working nights is great since it is almost like having a 4 day weekend every weekend.
Svantaggi
The quality of your experience depends on your middle management, if they are great and work with you towards your goals then you will succeed... if not you will fail. The industry is cyclical and when they do reductions they don't do them gradually, they conduct reductions in massive sweeps. If you work on the 1st shift (day shift as a development engineer) expect to be called at all hours of the night if your process is not effective. You can be assigned terrible processes and have to recover from other people's failings. If you work on shift as a process engineer, you are accountable for all and any mistakes made while you were dealing with something. Yet, if you are handed a mess that causes excursions by someone not on shift they take no blame and have no consequences.