Adam was a very prominent Chrome DevRel and top voices of the web platform. I personally owe to his content (blog, snippets, podcast, talks, youtube, social media etc.) to stay up-to-date on things.
It’s a bit of a shock to me that he of all people is getting laid off and that too in such an ugly way.
A company will often try and avoid letting a candidate know that they are being considered for firing, or that the decision has already been made, until the trigger is pulled.
That's normal. What's uniquely ugly/American is conveying those firing decisions by locking the fired employees out of their email at 6 PM on Friday. In most countries this is illegal.
I suppose organizing departure in an adult manner (Offer some time to finish task, pass on knowledge, etc... AND let the people leave earlier if they prefer - you know, the whole "think about the team" thing) would also violate someone's meritocratic free speech ?
Do you really need to make it a freedom of speech issue? can't it be recognized as a human as a pile of shit to rug pull someone like that and not let them at least cancel their own talk?