Working at a large corporation can offer a number of benefits over working at a start-up. Having worked at a couple of each – and somewhere in the middle – I generally think the pros and cons of the two even out. Sure, the smart and talented can advance faster within a startup, but it won’t necessarily translate into a step up outside of the company as easily as working with a big brand name. Unless, of course, that startup was Foursquare.

But what’s interesting are the number of larger companies trying to act like startups – creating innovation labs and teams for expediting new product development, looking to web-based software solutions to cut costs, and shifting human resources around projects rather than departments to improve efficiency. It’s interesting…until some of the benefits of working at a large company – like the comfort of tech support, the uniformity that comes with operating rules, and all those helpful additional human resources – start falling apart.

Tech Is Not Supportive: You have to enter a tech support system into a queue so someone in India can call you and talk you through what is obviously a support desk script. That’s if they didn’t just send you a link to where to find the help online.

Rules Create Chaos: Because the company is trying to be “innovative,” you are regularly asked to research, use, or otherwise do business with tools and platforms that are not allowed. I worked at a company that didn’t allow access to personal emails, file sharing, or social media platforms –basically no communication was permitted that wasn’t on their firewalled servers. That made it interesting for the team that developed new cloud-based software that they themselves couldn’t access from within the building. Or for those of us who worked with outside vendors where we needed to share files that exceeded our email limits. Rather than ask the vendor to burn a disk (remember those?) and send it to me, I tried to get tech to grant permission for us to use Google Docs. I was sent back a 10-page form for “Google to complete and return.”

More Humans Mean More Hurdles: Larger companies typically have more resources, but also taller organizational structures to manage all those people. So while there’s more talent to tap, there are also more personalities to persuade, individual and team goals to navigate (read “silos”), and, in many cases, just a lot more time spent in meeting – none of which translate to a creative, innovative environment. And when the big company tries to break down the structure to toward greater efficiency, they often look at just one aspect – like trying to solve the silo issue, and attack it from through communication or team structure. But it’s a system-wide issue, one that requires looking at a number of elements, like how the employee evaluation process, for example. If you’re given team members for Project X, but those individuals are going to be measured only against goals for Projects A and B (because those goals were set months ago), well, then you can guess where they’ll put their focus.

I’m sure there are other examples – including what big companies could do better. Please add your thoughts below!