Disclaimer: This piece is written anonymously. The names of a few particular companies are mentioned, but as common examples only.
This is a short write-up on things that I wish I'd known and considered before joining a private company (aka startup, aka unicorn in some cases). I'm not trying to make the case that you should never join a private company, but the power imbalance between founder and employee is extreme, and that potential candidates would
A type is a collection of possible values. An integer can have values 0, 1, 2, 3, etc.; a boolean can have values true and false. We can imagine any type we like: for example, a HighFive type that allows the values "hi" or 5, but nothing else. It's not a string and it's not an integer; it's its own, separate type.
Statically typed languages constrain variables' types: the programming language might know, for example, that x is an Integer.
In that case, the programmer isn't allowed to say x = true; that would be an invalid program.
The compiler will refuse to compile it, so we can't even run it.