By trading salary (you could get paid more at a big co) for equity you are inherently making a financial decision by investing the difference. Keeping these things seperate is not the same as not thinking about them.
If you are talking taking about taking a pay cut to work with people you really like or to do more interesting or less stressful work then I understand. Apart from that I don't see any reason why you would take less salary unless you think the rick reward ratio was favorable.
My original point was that ignoring equity when evaluating a job offer isn't the best approach.
Most job offers don't include two options to choose from. Since I did have that choice, I evaluated my options exactly as you mention: whether to (effectively) invest the salary difference in exchange for more equity.
In most cases, job offers don't include that choice. If that had been my situation too, I would have evaluated whether the salary was worth doing the job. And then evaluated whether the equity was worth the risk of joining an insecure company.
But since this isn't an absolute rule, I might have tried to negotiate more equity if the salary wasn't quite high enough for me to make the jump. Or maybe asked for extra vacation time, or the option to work from home. (I've done all of those.) I know salary and equity cannot be kept totally separate, but I do start there when evaluating how I will respond to a given job offer.
Isn't it the case that they have been decoupled such that a prospective employee could negotiate for a higher salary than that which was calculated on the risk/reward see-saw, merely by saying they have to protect themselves from a Zynga option-clawback scenario? It's not a hypothetical.
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/riskrewardratio.asp
By trading salary (you could get paid more at a big co) for equity you are inherently making a financial decision by investing the difference. Keeping these things seperate is not the same as not thinking about them.
If you are talking taking about taking a pay cut to work with people you really like or to do more interesting or less stressful work then I understand. Apart from that I don't see any reason why you would take less salary unless you think the rick reward ratio was favorable.