I'm reading How Google Works by Jonathan Rosenberg & Eric Schmidt. In the Talent - Hiring is the most important thing you do chapter, the authors briefly pause the management topics to give career advice (specially directed to young people).
When talking about compensation, the authors argue that, early in your career, the most important thing is to pick the right industry where you will get paid well in the future, than to pick companies now based on compensation. The reason that they give is that, in the future, your compensation will have much more equity and early in your career stock options are limited compared to the future.
While I agree that the advice in itself is sound, I cannot completely understand the reason. For me, the advice makes sense because your compensation in the future is going to be far bigger than today, but in my opinion the fact that you will be receiving more equity/stock then is actually a con. What I (perhaps incorrectly) inferred from their argument is that its more advantageous to have a big part of your compensation being equity/stock than actual salary. I don't see the sense in this, for me given that compensation is X I would pick everything in salary and no stock if this was an option. In the particular case of Google, Tesla & other companies, there is no dividend, so I cannot expect my income to grow steadily for receiving these options.
My best guess is that a company will not be willing to give the same compensation if no stock is offered, but in that case I don't see much point in the reason for the advice. The only way I see this making sense is in a case similar to those of Jonathan and Eric, who became wealthy due to the massive valorisation of Google stock. But if I started working for Google today, I wouldn't have reasons to expect the same growth (and Google doesn't pay dividends). So what am I missing here?