I moved from a Ground contractor to Freight. Best thing that ever happened to me, professionally.
They're serious about being home every day. There are a few laydown runs where you go out and stay in a motel room for a day before making the return trip, but they're getting to be few and far between. Cheaper for the company to set up a meet that gets you back home every day than to pay for a room.
Notice I said home every *day,* because you're gonna be working nights. It's not that we don't have daytime road positions, it's just they're rare at most terminals and are usually taken by high-seniority guys. If you're at a large or even midsize terminal, expect to do time on the extra board. This can be a blessing, as you may get to do long runs that'll pay a lot better than an entry-level shuttle bid. Extra board is also a curse sometimes, though, because you never know whether you're working until you get the call.
Dock work is simple enough. You get the hang of it quickly if you're not afraid of doing a little physical labor. My experience with management at the hub where I do some dock work is that they'd rather you take the time to do things the right way, securing freight properly and building pallet decks to utilize as much trailer space as possible. It's not uncommon for me to only break one or two trailers in a typical 4-hour shift, spending a lot of that time rebuilding trailers as I load them because nobody else has been willing to do it right.
If you don't have your hazmat and doubles endorsements, start getting them right now. You will have to get them as a condition of your employment.
Best thing about Freight is we're paid the best of any of the opcos and we get paid for everything we do, be it fueling, dropping/hooking, going to the shop with a flat before we hit the gate, waiting for trailers to be released from the dock on long hub turns, breakdown or traffic jam delays en route, etc.
Worst thing is they're gonna see when you do anything dumb thanks to driver-facing cameras, so you better not be playing with a phone, speeding, changing lanes without signaling, etc. They treat you like a professional, and they expect you to act like a professional. If you have a blowout, better expect someone in safety to ask you why that tire wasn't written up on your pre-trip. (Tell them you must have ran over a piece of debris, by the way.)
You're gonna like it here better than Express, though. I can almost guarantee that much.