Why do we give out options instead of stock in the first place?
Early on, you issue founder grants if you want, at common stock price, paid in cash. A company is worth $100 in total, so you can buy 10% of it for $10.
Common and preferred can run separately in terms of price (although there's some relationship between the two; more enforced now than in the past.)
After Series A, 1% of the company would be a real amount of money -- maybe a $10mm valuation, so 1% would cost your engineer $100k at hiring. That's a lot of cash for an employee to invest.
If the company is public (either via acquisition or IPO), the company will sell part of your vested stock to cover taxes.
More likely, the company might give away shares to an employee in lieu of salary, but then the employee has to pay taxes on the value.
In other words, there's no way to obtain stock in a private company without facing some kind of expense. You're either paying money directly for shares, or paying taxes on the gift of shares.
The only way to avoid any of this is:
1) Be there at the very beginning, when shares have negligible value and can be bought easily. OR 2) Be granted stock options instead of real stock.