Look, I won't be kicking myself neither hard not soft, because I made a conscious decision to study and become proficient in another field.
You finance people work under the assumption that everybody cares—or should care—about the underlying concepts of your field, not to mention the details such as jargon and acronyms, just because we have to use money to conduct our daily life. That's demonstrably false.
It would be like assuming everybody who uses a smartphone should care and become proficient on TCP, signals, sockets, PIDs, scheduler priorities, and what not. In a word, foolish.
Considering the stock options you're given basically worthless, unless fortuitously proven otherwise, and making your employment decisions based on salary alone (and other non-monetary factors) is a valid strategy, because it allows you to avoid having to invest time into studying and understanding all those foreign concepts. Since time is a finite resource, choosing how to spend it while still having your butt covered is great advice.
On the other hand, if you are a founder of have otherwise invested a considerable amount of time and energy into those shares, it would be foolish not to seek professional advice on their management, as the article rightly points out.
Those aren't finance terms, they are taxpayer terms! Long term capital gains, alternative minimum tax, everyone knows who the IRS are...
"fiscal gibberish, fiscal gibberish, Then, in the very small chance that your equity is actually worth something [sic], fiscal gibberish, fiscal gibberish"
Sounds almost like the definition of a lottery to me.
perhaps you were referring to the 'infinite monkey theorem' ? i would rather believe programming to be nothing like that.
You can very well assume that it's worthless. If you do, chances are you will not do your research on things like early exercise and 83(b) filing (whether, for example, you work at a company that even allows things like that).
Then, in the very small chance that your equity is actually worth something, you will be kicking yourself really hard because if you'd only prepared, you could've been paying LTCG on the whole spread, rather than dealing with AMT and trying to find a private buyer for your illiquid stock to pay off the IRS and the CA FTB.