I really feel like, relative to many other fields, programmers sincerely their field to be a meritocracy. They don't always live up to the ideal. For example, a lot of programming interviews used to heavily feature mathematical riddles and brain teasers. More recently this has come to be considered a bad way to evaluate potential programmers, but at least the intent was trying to find out something about the candidate's intelligence, and not just trying to make a personality fit or something.