Not worth it - Luthier Santa Cruz Guitar Employee Review

hmmm I wish I could think of one.

The people there are weird. Owner seems chill, gives off good vibes , but that is about it, other than that zero. Manager is a bald guy he is always mad and he acts as he is doing you a favor by you working there. Delusional . I remember a guy named Bob super weird man , he would lash out and get really angry he is lucky we were working there and I had to be my professional self, the thing that shock me the most is the the other MEN working with him let him do that. strange guy thankfully for him I never saw him again. Then there was this guy name Zack who yelled at me for doing something "wrong" which was odd. since it was my first time doing it. ( the level of stupidity ) I decided to let it go because there are so many feminine men now days that I decided to let him be. whatever he is feminine I thought, Big mistake, that is never ok !. Later on, I needed an extension for my phone charger and tools and well i got a new extension from the office , actually someone else got it for me nice of him, well as soon as I started to use it this kid named ZAC comes up to me asks me where i got it and that I wasn't allowed to use it lol , I was like ok man no problem I am respectful and I just wanted to see what he was gonna do next. I imagined him taking it the extension and putting it back in the office but no he puts it right on his table and starts using it right in front of me after telling me that lol wow , that is insane right ? i mean the guy wasn't a kid. Those two were something else and by the way I DIDN'T SAY ANYTHING, I LET IT BE because i never argue with stupid plus i wasn't gonna make a big deal of it right ? wrong! That behavior is no good and should be fixed. THE JOB DIDN'T WORK OUT because no one care to really show how to properly do anything there, and they pay you 15 bucks an hour, I apply there because I WANTED TO LEARN MORE about the INSTRUMENT that I PLAY and I have been playing for ever, these guys are not musicians at all , they work with wood but they think they are better becasue they been working there for 10 years and i was there for a month lol typical toxic environment and if you wanna work there because you wanna learn something and be part of it , DO NOT WORK THERE . THE END.

The coworkers are amazing (they won’t last long though)

-Richard Hoover is living in his own world and will refuse to acknowledge anyone who tries to contradict him - The turnover rate for employees is so rapid that they can’t train new employees fast enough. When I first started, the average employee had been working there for 5+ years. I left a year ago and I can name maybe 3 people who are still working there now. - The pay is absolutely unsustainable. They regularly sell guitars for $50-60k and yet they start their employees at MINIMUM WAGE. Santa Cruz has one of the highest costs of living in California and they expect people to scrape by on absolutely nothing because “where else can you get an opportunity like this?” Passion is exploitable to Richard. He knows that there will always be fresh kids who love guitars and love lutherie, and he knows he can continue to cycle through them like most jobs cycle through Bic pens. - Richard Hoover has cultivated a reputation and persona in the boutique guitar world of being a sweet old hippy, but will gaslight, manipulate and confuse you until you feel like it’s your fault that nothing is working the way it’s supposed to. And then make you feel like it’s fair that you didn’t get your promised raise. His manner of speaking and his persona makes you really feel like he cares about each individual person he meets and interacts with, but he’s a ruthless capitalist underneath that who will cut you off at the slightest benefit to him or his company. - Everyone in the shop knows that as soon as Richard gets involved in a production or manufacturing issue, everything grinds to a halt and no progress will ever get made. It became a running joke that we would have to keep issues and problems a secret from management and be careful about who we were talking around in case Richard caught wind of it and throw a wrench into all the works. - Richard also can’t help but micromanage everything. To the point where individual department managers have no agency of their own, and employees are derided for any suggestions of their own. Often being told they “don’t have enough comparative analysis to make an accurate evaluation”. This results in nothing getting done ever. Because every little project needs to be personally approved and overseen by Richard, and there’s no possible way one person could do that much, none of it actually gets completed. Unused tools and piles of mess have built up around the workshop, creating a safety hazard in many instances, but no one is allowed to do anything about it because Richard needs to personally go through and sort out what’s worth keeping and what we can get rid of. -The production manager works remotely from New York. Let me say that again: the so-called production MANAGER doesn’t even live in the same region. Lives over 2000 miles away - Speaking of the production manager, Rick is a scam artist. Was first introduced to me as a “published astrophysicist”, but I eventually learned he just took hallucinogens a few times and self published a short book on Amazon. - Rick has described his own job as a “data collector”. The way he describes it, he keeps track of production, tracks multiple tables of information and written conversation so he can isolate where issues in production are and condense the data into relevant information to communicate to Richard, who makes the final decisions on everything. If you told that to anyone who is well versed in communications, they would explain that that is known as a filter and that filters should be avoided at all cost. Rick has worked himself into a position where he is the only person that Richard trusts, and so all of the relevant information for decision making goes through one person who is not even physically in the shop. Richard is the one with the final say, but Rick gets to decide what information is available for Richard to make any of those decisions and often will contradict the people who are physically in the shop working.