“As difficult as they are, these actions are necessary to focus our skills and investments on those activities that support our corporate strategy and have the greatest impact on our performance, growth and customer loyalty,” McCracken said in an all-hands memo.

“The industry and the market are changing, and we have to change, tooI…,” the CEO added. “It’s not enough to accelerate our growth. Our objective is profitable growth. You can never cut your way to growth. And I recognize that the actions we’re taking are difficult. But in the end, they will make CA stronger and more competitive.”

High-tech employees in Silicon Valley – including semiconductor, computer and software makers, Internet workers and scientific-research-and-development workers, among others–earned $130,700 per person in 2009, based on annualized wage data from the first half of last year, compared with $120,100 in 2000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But adjusted for inflation, such workers made just $105,500 apiece in 2009 based on annualized data, or 12.2 percent less than those in 2000, the BLS said Tuesday as it released a report on trends in high-tech wages and employment since the dot-com area.

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Before making a decision, you might want to take gander at a list published a few days ago by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the 10 industries likely to see the largest employment decline over the next decade. I mention this here on the TTD blog because it includes several entrants with direct bearing on the tech industry.

Here’s a slightly annotated version of the list, ranked by the number of jobs expected to be lost:

• Department stores: Expected drop, 159,000, or 10.2 percent of 2008-year level of 1,557,000 jobs. Comment: Hello, Amazon! (AMZN)
• Semiconductors and other electronic component manufacturing: Expected loss, 146,000 jobs, down 33.7 percent. Comment: more jobs head to Asia.

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Sad to say, things are even worse in technology’s heartland, Silicon Valley. The unemployment rate there reached 9.3 percent in January. And given today’s Bureau of Labor Statistics report, it’s likely to have gotten worse. “If the January unemployment numbers resemble a horror movie, then I fear the sequels that will be released in February and March, as they will probably be even more frightening,” Carl Guardino, CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, told The Mercury News. “The message we hear loud and clear [from CEOs] is that it is bad, and sadly, only getting worse.”

Sacked.

A quick scan of the carnage.

• 8,000 whacked at Sprint (S)
• 6,000 let go at Royal Philips (PHG)
• 1,100 sacked at AMD (AMD)
• 4,000 adjusting to new economic realities at Motorola (MOT)
• 3,000 laid off at Seagate (STX)
• And a few hundred at Oracle (ORCL), as well
• 1,900 declared redundant at Dell (DELL)
• 5,000 losing their jobs at Microsoft (MSFT)
• 1,000 managers and 5,000 contractors pink-slipped at Alcatel-Lucent (ALU)
• 1,500 gone at Yahoo (YHOO)
• 12,000 released into the wild at AT&T (T)
• 600 cut loose at Adobe (ADBE)
• 6,000 aligned with the global economic climate at Sun (JAVA)
• And at Nortel (NT) 1,300 positions cut on top of the 1,200 previously announced

Grim isn’t it? Sad thing is, this is just a simple snapshot of what’s been happening in tech. According to the Department of Labor, employers in the states shed 524,000 workers in December, 2.6 million in all of 2008. That makes the last year the worst for layoffs since 1945, when 2.75 million jobs were lost. And that’s frightening, because according to some experts, we’ll get no respite in 2009. “We are very early in the cycle,” Peter Morici, a professor at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland told BusinessWeek, adding that we’ve so far only seen a sliver of the job losses to come. “We are going to see the fury of the Old Testament for what we have done to the economy.”

The U.S. economy lost 524,000 jobs in December, closing out the worst year for job attrition since World War II, according to the BLS. Total job losses for 2008: 2.6 million, the largest decline since 2.750 million jobs were lost in 1945. A 16-year high. Congratulations, folks….

Suffice to say, that’s quite a bit more than some economists were expecting. And that’s an ugly, ugly number, 2.750 million jobs lost. With the national unemployment rate rising to 7.2 percent during December, the first quarter of 2009 is also looking pretty bleak. “The job situation is ugly and is going to get uglier,” Richard Yamarone, chief economist at Argus Research, told Reuters. “There’s no reason to expect hiring anytime in the next three to six months. We are not going to see any hiring until the government steps in and acts. Talk doesn’t work.”

Robert Barbera, chief economist at the Investment Technology Group, was even more pessimistic–if that’s possible. “I would suspect that starting this past October and lasting through April, we will have really big job losses,” he told The New York Times. “We are not yet near the numbers of those earlier recessions,” he added, referring to the downturns of the mid-’70s and early ’80s, “but five more months like what we have been having and we’ll be there.”