[nhoven]

The author (as she admits herself) is in a pretty good situation - she has a very meaningful amount of stock options, a respectable salary, and she enjoys her job. Consider how much worse the situation gets when that last one isn't true. What if you're ready to leave, have an offer from another company that wants to double your salary, but have no way to keep your stock options? Or what if you're not ready to leave, but the company has decided that it's time for you to go? This happens frequently at rocketships, where an essential contributor when the company has 50 people may have a different skillset than that required when the company is 5000 people. Should employees lose their options if they need to leave a company before the IPO?

[brundolf]

For this reason I basically think of options as pure gravy. It'd be cool if I get some big opportunity to exercise them safely, but if not, I don't feel bad about giving them up. So I barely factor them in at all when comparing offers.

Stock grants on the other hand - it bears saying - are totally different.