When faced with the assertion that tech is a meritocracy — an observation oft mentioned in open source where getting one's patch into a repository has only to do with the merits of the patch and nothing to do with irrelevancies such as whether the author is a hermaphrodite — the author only mentions as counter-evidence 1) who gets to be on the cover of Wired, and 2) who has managed to parlay tech experience into soft, people-skills positions like directors in high-status companies. I'm not sure I would buy either of those as a metric of meritocracy.
Edit: to put a finer point on it, I don't think anybody has ever claimed that the politics of business hierarchies or that of thinly-veiled glamour magazines is meritocratic, and it doesn't help anyone understand the issue to conflate those things with tech.