Equity in the form of options is usually worthless. Even in the off chance that the company is wildly successful, your options will only be meaningful if you got them early enough to have a ton of them or a ridiculously low strike price. I've worked places where the total number of options offered to new employees (vesting over 5 years) were fewer than what the early employees and founders vested (and exercised) WEEKLY.

RSUs tend to be better because, unless your company goes out of business, they're usually at least worth _something_ when they finally vest. One thing about stock, however, is that after they're all vested, you're effectively seeing a decrease in your overall compensation. An RSU package that fully vests after 4 years incentivizes you to start looking for a new job after 4 years.

When I get an offer that contains options, I usually mentally value it at $0 and THEN consider whether the salary still seems competitive.

EDIT: I generally value _options_ at zero.

I also LOVE kasey_junk's strategy below of asking companies what they'd hypothetically offer in cash instead of equity. That's pretty much guaranteed to make the company get real about how they value their equity. I remember once negotiating ~$5K more in base salary to "give up" what OMG COULD TURN INTO MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN OPTIONS!!!! The company eventually went bust and sold for pennies on the dollar.