Nothing is perfect, but we do live in an approximation of a meritocracy, especially in tech. I had no special connections anywhere going into or coming out of college and ended up at my first company "the hard way". Any good references I made were only made through delivering results, I didn't know any interview questions in advance, and my college had no "prestige", certainly no Microsoft interviewers flying out to it - closest would be some waste of time joke of an "opportunity" I showed up to where IBM showed up to talk about their mainframes and AI stuff but offering absolutely no internship or job positions for software engineers. Coming from the tech desert of upstate New York, I actually had a lot of disadvantages working against me, working up from some low end job I only got half a year after graduating at a consultancy company to where I am now years later at a good remote programming position.