I don't know if kickstarter counts as a pure "tech company". They use technology, but they don't create it. Their customers are activists, so it's not surprising that their employees are, too.
"Although the concept has existed for centuries, the term "meritocracy" is relatively new. It was used pejoratively by British politician and sociologist Michael Dunlop Young in his 1958 satirical essay The Rise of the Meritocracy, which pictured the United Kingdom under the rule of a government favouring intelligence and aptitude (merit) above all else, being the combination of the root of Latin origin "merit" (from "mereō" meaning "earn") and the Ancient Greek suffix "-cracy" (meaning "power", "rule")... In this book the term had distinctly negative connotations as Young questioned both the legitimacy of the selection process used to become a member of this elite and the outcomes of being ruled by such a narrowly defined group."
The assignation of "quality" in people is a corrupt and folkloric reflection of the preferences of those in power, and that phenomenon is becoming ever more pronounced as industries consolidate.
That is what I did. I studied programming for a bit, started getting among the top in online programming competitions, applied to Google and got a really high salary. Anyone who is intelligent enough can do it if they have a computer with internet access.
People sometimes counter with something along the lines of:
> Just because you could do it doesn't mean others can do it, you are just an exception!
Yeah, exactly, other people are dumb so they can't become among the best of the world in these competitions within a year. If they could they would easily get similar jobs as I did though, there was no luck or privilege in what I did just talent. So the problem isn't that meritocracy doesn't work but that merit for these tech jobs is so unevenly distributed.
"Meritocracy" as a word is sometimes used by corrupt people, but that is like North Korea calling itself a democracy, it isn't a problem with meritocracy.
It's also worth noting that the same Wikipedia article that the parent poster points to says that the concept of meritocracy predates Young's coining of the word by centuries and also details its history of successful application by many societies in various eras.
The difference is between commodity labor and creative, talent-driven, or IP based production, and it seems clear which is a better metaphor for software engineers.
Tech is absolutely not a meritocracy.
It is quite possible for a talented engineer to rise quickly out of university but nearly impossible for a talented surgeon or industrial engineer without a decade+ of effort.
Maybe that makes them better surgeons, or maybe not. But it seems to me that ageism in tech complicates comparisons to fields which value experience instead of youth.
If you don't have grey hairs, you simply are not considered for the top jobs at all in certain industries. YOE (years of experience) is nearly everything for some professions, tech is surprisingly quite robust in that regard.