There's a lot of hope that goes into this. I have never had a stock option that was worth anything in the course of my career.¹ I stopped counting that as a factor long ago.

1. I can actually go one better on that. I worked at one company that had a "can't lost" stock purchase program. You put aside money with each paycheck and you would get stock purchased at the lower of the price at the beginning of the year and the end of the year with a 10% discount. Of course in the time between when the shares were purchased at the beginning of January and when they were delivered at the end of January, the stock fell 50%. They never recovered their value and I ended up getting cashed out when the company that bought them went private at around 10 cents on the dollar.