Pros
If you have no other prospects, this may be better than no job. Honestly, you should really exhaust all other options first.
Cons
Use to be that FPL looked real good on your resume. Not so much anymore. The word is out on this employer. After working there, you will be somewhat radioactive for a few years. Your best bet is to leave right after your hiring bonus commitment is up. Prospective employers will still consider you salvageable. Any more than 2 years at FPL, and its like you are permanently ruined in their eyes. Benefit package is ok, but good luck using it. If you actually use your sick days, education benefits, etc., it will affect your raise and bonus at the end of the year. Basically, they want their money back, and it will get it over time the longer you work there by screwing you over on raises and bonuses. That makes the benefits more of a loan program. They will lend you money for school, but then you literally pay it back later. Great company if you are the CEO or a stockholder. Ok if you are bargaining unit/Union employee. Terrible if you are non-bargaining unit employee, such as an engineer. For a company that year after year is making break-neck profits and shareholder returns, the engineers and working professionals are basically left out in the cold. You would be lucky to get 2-3% raises, and that's if you bust your butt and kiss a lot of nasty bottom. The starting salaries are bottom 25th percentile, too, so get ready to lose out on tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars throughout a working career at FPL versus the same experience at a competing utility in the same exact job title. The general treatment of employees is the worst I have seen in my 20+ year career. They hire you as "entry level" (even if you already have tons of related experience) to convince you that you don't deserve much pay to start with, but then immediately expect that you are an expert in your job after just 1-2 years. Of course, you get practically no training, and even the tiniest of mistakes can lead to major outages and equipment damage. You will carry all the blame, so forget about raises, promotions, and bonuses for several years should you fall in one of the hundreds of traps they have setup. The company is also suffering a diversity crisis, which is becoming more common amongst all larger companies. FPL is desperate to promote persons based solely on ethnicity and/or gender to meet certain diversity goals. The result is that lower and middle management is riddled with people that are absolutely terrible at their job. The company and working there already sucks enough, but then you also have to deal with bosses that will never be good leaders no matter how much they get trained or experience they amass. Additionally, the company conducts an "independent" employee survey every two years. You will be greatly intimidated to participate in this "voluntary" survey. If you don't participate, they will come after you. If you answer anything that makes them look bad, they will come after you. The testing agency gives them enough data to pick you out as the one that didn't do the survey, or that you were likely the one who made negative comments. The agency breaks it down to them. The class you in very small groups of 3-5 people. Your boss will go around and ask everyone individually if they did the survey. He/she can then surmise who didn't and come after you. They will also tell them how many people answered negatively on a question. They will conduct several ongoing "training sessions" in the following weeks and months to ask people how they answered certain seemingly unimportant questions. If you tell them you answered any of these unimportant questions negatively, then they will assume you were the one who answered the important questions negatively. There goes your raise, bonus and promotion. Great system! Instead of being a tool to gain valuable feedback and using the information to improve the way things are done, they use it to crucify the employees for being honest and trying to make things better on a voluntary, supposedly anonymous survey. Bottom line: Unless you have absolutely no choice, pass on this employer. This is a last resort type of deal.
