I've been a BA for a little more than 10 years, doing both internal and external facing software depending on the company. On the one hand, I enjoy the work. But I have noticed some challenges that I never see anyone discuss, so I want to know if anyone here wants to chat about them.

One that I've encountered a few times and struggle with currently is when working in a client-facing BA role. If you ask your boss (or anyone) what your role is, they'll say that you're there to represent the interests of the client. I agree with that 100%. But I've noticed that they make it nearly impossible to fully learn the client's perspective. They want me to learn as much as I can about the software from the client's perspective but they impose constraints that make it difficult: I can only learn from our internal team of developers and QA. A former job only let me learn from internal SME's but not our customer service folks who took calls and helped the clients with problems with the software on a daily basis. I am not allowed to learn from the clients directly, by either spending time shadowing them or interviewing them on the phone or anything.

I assume that the issue they fear is that by asking to learn from the client, the client may get the idea that we're not the experts we claim to be. Which in my opinion is not at all realistic given that everyone knows I'm new on the job - even the clients know that. I doubt the clients would be so judgemental that they'd resent me learning about their needs and perspective.

So here I am, learning how the clients use the software from QA people who aren't client-facing and don't really know first hand how the clients use the software. Has anybody else encountered this?

What other challenge or downside to the job have you encountered?