mgraczyk parent
It's not really, because it's finite. You don't generally dilute the options pool when you hire new employees, you give them some slice of a scarce options pool
Sure, but there's an extent to which the the board and its constitutive shareholders already expect to be giving away options for new employees, and as such will have allocated a pool for such purpose -- both for the "standard" package, and for "hard negotiators". For traditional tech startups (i.e. ones not so flush with cash as OpenAI), giving these away is far easier than giving away more real-world, honest-to-god cashflow, because that directly drains your runway, while all equity does is make your cap sheet look marginally worse.
> all equity does is make your cap sheet look marginally worse
But at the time the employee is negotiating this has already been decided. The company has some valuation and you are offering some known percentage of that scarce resource. You could argue that the valuation itself is the thing being manipulated (which is partially true), but that doesn't change the cost of the offer to the company in units of equity %