I think you are correct about the big companies, but I didn't get the feeling that's who the author was addressing. They seemed to be addressing the new up and comers with founders who are stingy with equity and bad at sharing the limelight with their staff.
Big companies were small companies before they were big companies. It is important to understand that as they grow companies issue new stock, that new stock "dilutes" the existing stock, so lets say your a new company and you have Scrooge as you CEO who gets half, and you as the employee get 1/100th. Now while the company is growing and new investors are coming on board, typically new stock gets issued, they get new stock, the CEO's 1/2 becomes 2/5ths and you the employee who is doing great get another 'evergreen' option to keep you interested. So the CEOs percentage drops a lot faster than your percentage as an employee does. It may be that you're stays constant with new options while their falls. But none of that matters if the company is growing and growing. The stock splits two for one and you've got twice the number of shares. If the company is going to become big, you will always do well in a company that has been sharing equity from the start. The math makes it come out that way.
But it does only work if the company succeeds enough to either be acquired for the product or go public. Sometimes you can be acqui-hired and still get rich, there are number of folks who got into Facebook that way early on and have done well, but as always there is timing, luck, and quality. If you are in this valley to "get rich" then my experience is that you won't do as well as people who are here to "do great things." That was made really obvious to me when the company that acquired the company I helped get going hit an all time high, and some of the employees did nothing but hit 'refresh' on the NASDAQ page all day "Oh look another $100K, oh wait, -$50K, or good $200K, oh wait ..." They became completely non-functional as employees. The people who were there to get things done, didn't have that issue.
yeh I think that's the point if a large incumbent Telco's share options are returning £80k tax fee (that's the standard one every employee gets not key technical staff).
a start up is going to have to do a lot better than that and more open about the cap table and dilution protection - id expect if they had a good 10x exit I would expect at least 1/2 a mil.
Back in 2000 one vc backed company I was working for every member of staff was a dollar millionaire on paper at one point - pity the coop didn't buy us out :-(
