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.”