At the risk of being pedantic/taking the pessimistic take, "tech is a meritocracy but..." seems entirely in line with my conclusion of "nothing is a meritocracy

At the risk of being pedantic/taking the pessimistic take, "tech is a meritocracy but..." seems entirely in line with my conclusion of "nothing is a meritocracy, although tech enables those with merit more than most" Someone with a highschool diploma CAN certainly succeed (two of my strongest mentors, one of which a googler, did not have college degrees) but they had _significant_ hurdles to get where they did; and even in my own experience I've run into (nearly verbatim): "Since you have never held a senior rank, we are not willing to look at you further" (turning down any opportunity to "prove onesself" as well). As I've said in posts elsewhere, tech is as susceptible to needing other signaling channels as any other field, even if we weight the signaling of "personal achievements" higher. If we're coming at this from different angles around the basis of whether these side effects preclude the existence of a meritocracy, I can accept that disagreement; since I do tend to take a more pessimistic take on things and could see how the opposite could be argued. (and as I said in the OP, I'm not convinced a "pure meritocracy" could even happen, so perhaps that's a vacuous comparison anyway)