[vidarh]

I have, several times, and I generally treat them as pretty much lottery tickets. That is: I expect at least market rate, often above in order to compensate for risk, and the options are an extra bonus if you're lucky. This is achievable. It's mostly younger people that "buy" the story of how you're going to get rich off the options so you should accept a lower salary. I did that too, a couple of times, before I "accidentally" learned that this is not an issue. Either you're important enough that they'll stretch, or you're in a junior enough position that the options allocation will be tiny anyway, in which case you're better off in a more stable company.

But the options I've made the most money on was ironically from the only post-IPO company I've worked for (and where I joined years after the IPO), rather than the startups where I've had shares that have at some point or other had a paper-value magnitudes higher.

And the reason I did well there was that they clearly didn't value their options very highly - they threw a large options allocation after me to get me to accept a lower salary than I asked for for the first 6 months for political reasons (it would have put my salary above the salary of one of the higher ranked people who had to sign off on the hire, and they clearly didn't think that'd go down very well... so instead HR quietly promised me a "review" after 6 months and bumped up then).