Investments and Business

After a year of big layoffs, job cuts at the tech industry’s largest companies trickled into the first month of 2024.Google started the year with layoffs of several hundred employees and a promise of more cuts to come. Amazon followed by trimming hundreds of jobs in its Prime Video department. Meta quietly thinned out middle management. Microsoft also cut 1.900 jobs in its video game division.The layoffs continued even as sales and profits jumped and share prices spiked. That disconnect, tech insiders and analysts say, is reflective of an industry facing two big challenges: coming to terms with frenetic work…

As far as signs of trouble in a company go, a hole blowing through the wall of one of its airplanes at 16,000 feet is not subtle.So it was not a surprise that the Boeing chief executive, Dave Calhoun, spent most of the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Wednesday focused on safety. “We caused the problem, and we understand that,” he said of the Jan. 5 incident.Mr. Calhoun said the company had instituted additional quality controls and paused production for a day to focus on safety and quality. But Boeing’s issues span decades, and some aviation and management experts have…

The United States produced an unexpectedly sizable batch of jobs last month, a boon for American workers that shows the labor market retains remarkable strength after three years of expansion.Employers added 353,000 jobs in January on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Labor Department reported on Friday, and the unemployment rate remained at 3.7 percent.The report also put an even shinier gloss on job growth for 2023, including revisions that added more than 100,000 to the figure previously tallied for December. All told, employers added 3.1 million jobs last year, more than the 2.7 million initially reported.After the loss of 14…

A lot of heat, but will there be regulation?Five technology C.E.O.s endured hours of grilling by senators on both sides of the aisle about their apparent failures to make their platforms safer for children, with some lawmakers accusing them of having “blood” on their hands.But for all of the drama, including Mark Zuckerberg of Meta apologizing to relatives of online child sex abuse victims, few observers believe that there’s much chance of concrete action.“Your product is killing people,” Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, flatly told Zuckerberg at Wednesday’s hearing. Over 3.5 hours, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee laid…