Quite a few of the tech jobs in the SE US are clustered around military bases. If you want to start a military-industrial complex contractor, and for some bizarre reason you cannot do it in the DC Sprawl, what you can do is find a {choose 1 or more: disabled, native American, veteran, female, or other lawfully preferred minority} figurehead to own 51% of your business, grab some office space near a base, and start submitting bids, which you then subcontract to someone with actual employees. Then you start hiring employees and have them work on-site. Then you get acquired by a giant like SAIC or CSC or Raytheon or Boeing. That makes the local labor pool employed by a company that is probably headquartered elsewhere.

The downside of this model is that you never get to actually build anything cool, so you either can't attract top talent, or they hate working for you and your neurotic government customer. So you have to slap on the silver handcuffs (high salary) to keep them from moving away.

It sort of poisons the well for other kinds of tech businesses. Top talent either doesn't want to be there or costs more than you might expect. Mediocre talent is happy to warm a chair to pad out a contract for the same salary you would pay to do actual work. And the dregs are the same there as everywhere else.

Lousy healthcare options and lousy schools: https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-the-best-schools/5335/