Your People Are Not Screwdrivers

The line that should not have left the room

On the May 7 Cloudflare earnings call, Matthew Prince announced two things in the same breath. The first was the best quarter in the company’s sixteen-year history — $639.8 million in revenue, up 34% year over year. The second was that he was laying off 1,100 people, roughly one in five employees, in the first mass reduction Cloudflare has ever done.

An analyst on the call asked the obvious question: if you just had your best quarter ever, why are you firing this many people?

The answer Prince gave, describing the AI-driven productivity gains he was seeing across his teams, included this line:

“It was like going from a manual to an electric screwdriver.”

I have been thinking about that sentence for a week, and I want to be careful about what I do and don’t think it means.

The slip is the tell

I don’t think Matthew Prince hates his employees. I don’t think he sat down with his communications team and workshopped the most dehumanizing analogy they could come up with. The opposite, almost certainly. He probably believes — and his “Today is a hard day” post on the morning of the announcement suggests he believes — that he treated this moment with care.

But the analogy is the analogy. The metaphors we reach for when we are explaining ourselves are not random. They are the shape of the way we already see. You don’t compare your spouse to an electric screwdriver, even on your worst day, because you don’t see her that way. The frame leaks through the language.

The book Leadership and Self-Deception, by the Arbinger Institute, calls this being “in the box.” Their central observation, which has stuck with me for years, is that we can hold a perfectly reasonable principle in the abstract — of course you don’t treat people as tools — and simultaneously be doing exactly that, and not notice. The whole structure of self-deception is that nobody in the box thinks they’re in the box. From inside, it feels like clarity. It feels like leadership. It feels like just calling things what they are.

The screwdriver line is what the inside of the box sounds like when it speaks.

What the box does

Arbinger’s frame is that when we are in the box, we stop seeing the people around us as people — full interior worlds, with their own hopes and fears and families and futures — and start seeing them as one of three things: a vehicle (a means to an end), an obstacle (in the way), or an irrelevance (not worth our consideration).

A screwdriver is the purest possible vehicle. It has no interiority. It exists to apply torque. When the metaphor a CEO reaches for to describe his workforce is a hand tool, that is not a slip in the comms sense. That is a window.

The second thing the box does is generate justification. Once we have treated someone as an object, we need to make the story add up, so the explanations pile on. Look at the Cloudflare framing through that lens.

“This isn’t a cost-cutting exercise or an assessment of individuals’ performance.”

That is the box reassuring itself about its own virtue.

“A lot of the support people that provide support behind them, those roles aren’t going to be the roles that drive companies going forward.”

That is the box defining the targets out of relevance. Support people. Support behind them. Roles, not people. The grammar is doing the work.

Two, ten, even a hundred times more productive.

That is the box inflating the necessity of the action. If the new state of the world is one-hundred-x — a number nobody can audit and nobody will be held to — then of course the math demands what the math demands.

None of these statements are evil. Each one is the kind of thing a thoughtful person says when they are trying to explain a hard decision to themselves and to the public. That is the point. The box is built out of reasonable sentences.

The cost that doesn’t show up next quarter

Cloudflare’s stock dropped about 23% on the news. Most of the commentary fixated on that — on whether the layoff signals weakness, whether the AI productivity story is real, whether the timing was clean. Those are fair questions but they are the wrong questions.

The real cost of leading from inside the box doesn’t show up in next quarter’s earnings. It shows up two and three years later, in the texture of the culture. People who watched the screwdriver call are right now updating their internal model of what their employer thinks of them. The strongest engineers — the ones with options — are now slightly more open to a recruiter’s email than they were on May 6. Trust, once it is recoded transactionally, is very expensive to re-establish.

Arbinger calls this dynamic collusion. The short version: boxes invite boxes. When leadership treats people as instruments, the org learns to be transactional in return. People stop bringing judgment and start optimizing for measurable output. They hide problems instead of surfacing them. They become, in fact, more screwdriver-like. And then leadership points at the data and says, see, this is what they always were.

The honest part

I want to be careful not to pretend this is easy. Layoffs happen. Hard decisions about roles, capacity, and direction are part of the job. Being out of the box doesn’t mean being soft, and it doesn’t mean every role is sacred. You can let someone go and still be out of the box. What changes is the way of being underneath the decision.

Out of the box, you would not stand on an earnings call and reach for a power-tool metaphor to describe the 1,100 people whose families are listening. Not because it is bad PR, though it is. Because the metaphor would not be available to you. It would not be in your hand to reach for. The way you saw the moment would not produce that sentence.

The work, then, is not on the comms team. It is on whatever is sitting one level beneath the comms team, in the heads of the people running the company.

Where I stand

I am building Particle41. I run a services firm, which means the people are not “behind” the work — they are the work. The engineer in the standup, the architect at the whiteboard, the PM in the retro. Clients are not buying torque; they are buying judgment. The minute I start talking about my team like power tools, I have already started shipping a worse product. That is true ethically and it is true commercially.

I won’t pretend I have never been in the box. I have. Anyone who has run a company for a while has. What I want — for myself, for the people I work with, for whoever is reading this — is the habit of catching it. The willingness to notice when the language starts to slip. The friend who will tell me when I am reaching for a metaphor that I should put down.

If you watched the Cloudflare call and felt something, that something was real. Treating people like tools is not okay. The hard part is not believing that. The hard part is staying out of the box on the days when believing it would be inconvenient.