If you join a larger company, yes you'll get less. If you stay in a company while it grows larger and you then negotiate for more options, maybe you'll get relatively many, as you're now rather uniquely valuable to that company. What people do instead is decide that options aren't worth it any more because how much the price will rise at this point, and ask for relatively small salary increases instead of relatively large option grants. This is doubly wrong since their salary is already pretty high at that point and there's a ceiling on salaries for various reasons that I don't fully understand but which certainly exist, while there's much less of a ceiling on option grants.