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You know what's funny. I would not call the environment you're describing as a tech company. I would call what you're talking about a tech-enabled company. If you are working at a tech-enabled company, then I 100% agree with you about moving to management becoming inevitable. Tech-enabled IC's are basically rendering JSON/SQL/NoSQL in on Desktop/Web/Mobile. If you're company is just spinning up .Net Core/Node/Django/fill-in-framework-here to build a website to show some data, that's not a tech company to me.

When I say tech company, I'm talking about companies where software engineering skills actually matter. where a O(n²) algorithm also will cost your business. In my definition of a tech company there are tons of new things happening. Look at the spaces like AR, self-driving, rocketry, and machine-learning, and computational photography — no one in any of those fields is doing the same thing they were doing even 2 years ago.

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I dunno man, this sounds like some unnecessary exclusionary gate keeping on the really broad term of “tech company”. Instead of trying to take this broad term and scope it down for your own purposes why not use a narrow term for your narrow definition. This is like when CS graduates claim people without a CS degree aren’t software engineers and shouldn’t be hired into the same roles... to render JSON on a mobile device.

It's just my own mental model that I use to separate companies like Hertz and Taxi's (both of whole have have apps) from Lyft and Uber.

How would you describe the difference between those two types of companies?

"Negligible", or "a matter of scale" from technology POV?

Your definition of tech company excludes most projects at Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple.

You're absolutely correct. That's why if I applied to work at any of those companies (I've already worked at Amazon) I would be extremely particular about what project I work on.

Yes, don't think that is wrong though. There are very few teams even in the FAANGs that are working on interesting problems. So instead of talking about tech companies, we should be talking about tech teams.

These are ad companies.

Out of these, only Google has substantial share of revenue from the ads.

Then you have your own special definition. A "tech company" is a company whose primary business is tech, including companies pushing out boring line-of-business applications like you describe. It is in contrast to companies whose primary focus is something else e.g. agriculture or pharmaceuticals.