After getting publicly fired during a demo at the Build 2025 conference, and then subsequently rehired, it appears the reunion with Scott Hanselman, VP of Developer Community Relations was short lived.
Scott posted a picture of his Blue Badge along with the “Open to Work” banner on his LinkedIn profile. In another farewell post, Scott explained the circumstances of his departure.
”I slipped up. I just needed to send a quick email to get to Inbox Zero again, and I didn’t want to write a prompt, then readjust, re-prompt, re-edit for 45 minutes using Copilot. So I cheated and wrote it myself. Oh well, lessons learned.”
We asked Chief People Officer Kathleen Hogan for comment on the firing. In her email response she said: “We have a zero tolerance policy for authentic human generated content. If you are not using AI you are in violation of our employee policies. We have automatic scans as part of our Data Creation Policies (DCPs) that detect any hint of unique human personalities in any emails, team chats, code comments, or other technical documentation, and if it does not come back with a high confidence score of being AI generated, it is automatic grounds for termination. Scott’s email was instantly flagged and as a result he was terminated.
This email was generated by Copilot! AI generated content may be inaccurate.”
image sources
- scott_hanselman_second_firing: “Scott Hanselman” by Ronald Woan, CC BY-NC 2.0