Also, Stock options are mostly at least in Silicon valley an excuse for a company to get away with paying less to their employees. Another excuse is to use them as a way of saying "It is your company so suck it up and do X" where X might be work 18 hours a day to anything. Classic case of misleading vividness [1] of stellar performance of a fraction of the startups causing this phenomenon to spread.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misleading_vividness