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Dunno these days, but wrong question.

Stock is a scam unless they are grants of actual shares in a publicly traded company that you are permitted to sell immediately if you want to. Anything else is a shell game of some sort in practice. Sure, a few guys win the lottery, but you won't. Not statistically, that is. Your options will either never vest, get diluted to hell, get Zucked away from you, or remain eternally locked up in a private company. Even when you do get cashed out, it's seldom for much. A friend of mine (who practically singlehandedly wrote their whole data ingest system) got $50k from his options when the place he worked got acquired. Spread over his time at the company and divided into his salary, it was equivalent to around a 5% raise. Peanuts.

The "$10k to $50k per day" nonsense from the matt.sh article is bad accounting of the handful of devs who did win the stock option lottery while ignoring the devs who didn't and the differences between them (luck and politics).

If you can't use it to buy a hamburger tomorrow, it's not actual pay.