Vantaggi
Pay is pretty good and I like the benefits (cheaper train travel particularly). Feels pretty easy to maintain a 9-5 work schedule and avoid unpaid overtime and my immediate management (as well as the majority of my colleagues in performance) were pretty good all things considered.
Svantaggi
Being a performance analyst is a fun juxtaposition of the information you provide being considered critical by everyone, and yet those same people don't respect your time, capacity or output. Stakeholders (especially senior ones) are extremely demanding and their whims change on a dime. The data infrastructure is extremely limited, and so the role involves being your own data engineer, scientist and analyst, whilst being expected to knowledgeable in all areas of the railway. Oh, and we have to be in the office 3 days a week apparently? You can do most railway office jobs anywhere as long as you have a laptop and an internet connection. You don't need to go into an office to sit in a meeting room for 3 hours when I could do the same from the comfort of home using Microsoft Teams. I appreciate that signallers and other staff don't have that luxury, but maybe they should be paid more for this sacrifice, rather than making the rest of us suffer for no reason. Just a thought.