Your numbers seem to be a couple years out of date, or maybe you're (no offense) living in an economic backwater like Florida where salaries are severely depressed due to the tourism effect.
The base salaries for Entry level SWE roles are in the $80k-100k range nationally [0].
Additionally, most finance roles start in that ranges, though high finance has starting salaries comparable to Big Tech new grad.
Even Biotech new grad salaries tend to be in the $60k-80k range.
If Florida is "backwater", then so is most of the rest of the country outside of a handful of overpriced cities where earning 80k is required to be able to afford a room in an apartment - not the whole apartment, and certainly not buying one.
I mean yea, they absolutely are economically speaking - especially when looking at where new grad college educated jobs are located [0].
Heck, most states have fallen into a technical recession [1]. Florida is weird simply because of how much tourism and retirement adjacent industries skew it's economy (eg. Elderly care, primary care, etc) - in fact, healthcare services (as in elderly care, hospice care, and homecare) is the only non-skilled industry that is seeing a significant expansion in the US.
I personally along with HN, other VCs, and PE funds have been actively following the MSO space for a couple years now because of this boom.
And I say this as someone who kinda likes Florida (Dr Philips reminds me and moreso the missus of bougie gated communities back in ASEAN - it's a nice place for us to Fat FIRE).
Oof that is a shame given how severely CoL has risen across much of the South. Salary expectations on the employers side is just too low, but then again, I guess most industries are low margins ones sadly.
The base salaries for Entry level SWE roles are in the $80k-100k range nationally [0].
Additionally, most finance roles start in that ranges, though high finance has starting salaries comparable to Big Tech new grad.
Even Biotech new grad salaries tend to be in the $60k-80k range.
Same with manufacturing engineering roles [1]
[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/levels/entry-leve...
[1] - https://www.salary.com/research/salary/alternate/entry-manuf...