I think most people should understand by now, these massive option grants are basically playing roulette with a huge chunk of your remuneration package. It's meant to align your interests with the company but let's face it - no one starting at facebook today will have any meaningful impact on the share price as an individual. Instead it's a great way of companies making their employees take significant risk.<p>When I graduated I could have worked at 3 generally similar companies, the lowest salary offer was £27k, the highest was £35k, all had significant RSU packages (nothing like crazy US numbers). In the 5 years following my graduation, 1 company got bought by Intel providing a 50% pop for the share price, 1 company got bought by Softbank providing a 50% pop for the share price, 1 got eviscerated by Apple and practically destroyed the share price. There was no meaningful way of knowing which way any of those would go. As a graduate I had no real chance of impacting the shareprice of those events. Yet for some reason between 0-30% of my renumeration was determined by it!