I don't understand your statement about how 1% of 100,000 shares is different from 1% of 10,000. How is it different?

You reminded me of the startup I did where we would offer people 1% of the company, and the candidates would say "that's only 2000 shares. This other company is offering me 50,000 shares."

It can get depressing trying to hire people sometimes.

Well there are two ways to go with that. You can keep your number of outstanding shares small, and then only hire people who are good at math. Or you can keep your number of outstanding shares enormous, so that you can offer people grants in the 100,000 or even million shares range, and get the people who are just looking for a lot shares.

Sounds like you may need to revise your screening process... these people should not get this far.

We were hiring developers, not finance people.

I'm not an employer, but a developer not understanding how percentages work would be a red flag to me.

By about 900 shares.

Joking aside, though, I don't think it's different at all in this context.

Of course it's different if you are comparing it to the same scale units. But if you are talking about 1% of the company, it doesn't matter.