[notfreeyet]

It's always been yes and no. It's class-based.

Yes, the management class (or officer class) is for the pedigreed elite. You're trying to join the manager class and they have a line out the door of people with pedigree. What school did you go to? Yeah, so why would they pick you...they're themselves incompetent so why would they use competence as the criteria? VCs invest almost exclusively invest in this class and so the cycle continues.

The technical class (or soldier class) does all the actual work and so they have to be competent. This is almost entirely meritocratic in Silicon Valley. Anyone even moderately competent can get well paying some job, even if it's not at one of the big adtech companies like Google/Facebook that can afford to mostly require pedigree from even their soldiers.

What's neat about Silicon Valley is that anyone of the technical class can simply promote themselves to the manager class given sufficient effort and luck. This alone is what makes it so special. It's very rare but it does happen.