Comment by esoterica

That’s not a rational way to evaluate compensation. Would a reasonable person rather take a guaranteed $1000 or a 10% chance of a $1 million? Obviously the latter, even if it has a large chance of being worthless. The not-stupid way of assessing a compensation package would be to conservatively estimate the expected value of the options and apply a substantial risk penalty in your objective function, not to round all volatile compensation down to zero.