We picked Sparky at the pound because my son wanted a lap dog. I am not a fan of lap dogs. They scream Paris Hilton to me. A study at the University of California at San Diego confirms our hunches that people pick dogs that resemble them, and sure enough, the rat terrier is like my son in that they are both delicate and jumpy. I think I am more labrador—strong and fun—so I thought I was being an extra good mom getting a dog I would never choose myself.

At the dog pound, Sparky sat in my son’s lap, but as soon as we got him home, he looked for larger laps. It turns out, Sparky prefers adults. At first we thought it was my son’s jumpiness. We told the kids to be calm around the dog.

But the dog got snappier as the week went on. And growly.

During this time, however, the Farmer and I were becoming attached to him. Sparky jumped into our laps every chance he got, and his rat terrier nature meant that  he would find a snuggly part for his nose every time he sat down. He is kissy and cuddly and loving. To adults.

So I said we had to give him back. I am mercenary in this way. Very practical. The point was to get my son a dog because dogs are calming for people with Aspergers. And the dog hates kids, so the dog has to go.

The Farmer, who does not have Aspergers, fell in love with the dog. And the Farmer, who said when I met him that he did not want animals in the house, now proposed that we get two dogs. One for the adults and one for the kids.

So, the Farmer was at my goat mentor’s house, and she needed to get rid of her dog because he bit a goat. The dog was big and good with kids, so the Farmer brought him home as a surprise: Max.

If Max and the Farmer were in that University of California study, everyone could have pegged them as a pair. Max is strong, sturdy, a little scraggly and has a sort of a slouch like he holds the weight of the world on his shoulders. Just like the Farmer.

It turns out that Max wants to be petted every second. He wants to sit in the kids’ laps. He follows the kids around. And, the truth is he has no interest in the goats—he just wanted someone to play with.

Sparky sees all the attention that Max gets, and it turns out Sparky can be nice to kids after all. He doesn’t want to be left out.

So now, everyone is happy. Sparky is nice to the kids, and Max is no longer nipping goats to get attention.

And I can’t help noticing that this illustrates three truths about hiring and firing employees:

1. Initial selection is largely dependent on being similar to the hiring manager. The term for choosing people (and dogs) who are like you is homophily. Miller McPhearson, a sociologist at University of Arizona, confirms that race and ethnic background are the biggest factors in this selection process. But those of you who are upper-middle class have a different set of hiring criteria to meet. Lauren Rivera, at Kellog School of Management, shows that when it comes to the upper-middle class, hiring managers discriminate based on extracurricular activities and how you dress rather than on race and ethnicity.

2. If the boss likes an employee, it doesn’t matter how terrible he is to everyone else. The employee will not get fired. So often people write to me to tell me that their co-worker is terrible but never gets fired. This is how the world works. It's such a ubiquitous problem that Bob Sutton, professor at Stanford Business School, wrote the book The No Asshole Rule to quantify the costs of keeping a jerk instead of firing him. (The cost, by the way, is about $150,000 year.) The only thing you can do is work to become as well liked by your boss as the terrible co-worker is.

3.  Bringing in someone new to the team can make everyone change, in unexpected ways. People are always responding to each other—everyone changes as other people enter the picture. Sometimes this means the leader introduces someone who is not as talented as others, but has a good personality, to help the team. Sometimes you have to experiment. We got lucky with Max. Which is good, because I don’t think I could handle a third dog.

Photos by Melissa Sconyers.

1. Gift recommendations are not really recommendations.
When a journalist or blogger (is there a difference?) writes about gift items, they get to review the gift items. Which means each gift was already a gift to the writer. I know about this because I’m terrible at it. For example, I would like Bose noise canceling headphones. They are too extravagant for me to buy for myself, so I should ask Bose for a trial pair and then tell you to buy them for your boss.

2. Christmas at work is bad for your boss. Really.
First of all, it’s bad for your company to have everyone give end-of-the-year gifts, or holiday gifts, or whatever companies are calling Christmas gifts lately. It’s bad because Christmas in the office is bad for diversity. I write about this every year, and every year it is the most controversial post. So you don’t need to write to me about how I am a Grinch and a cultural moron and Jews should move back to Israel, okay? Because I get those comments—about 300 of them—each year. So all I’m going to tell you now is that you are not helping your boss reach his or her performance goals for your team by undermining diversity by celebrating Christmas at work.

3. Thanksgiving is a better holiday to give your boss a gift.
You missed it this year. But for next year, remember to give a Thanksgiving gift to your boss because it’s a non-religious holiday and it’s about giving thanks instead of honoring Jesus’s birthday, and giving thanks, after all, is what is appropriate for you to do with a boss. (Note: Please do not tell me Christmas is secular. Only Christians feel enough authority over the holiday to say it is not Christian, which is proof that the holiday belongs to Christians.)

4. The best gift for a boss is handmade.
I know your mom has been telling you this ever since you could write your name on construction paper. But it’s not just your mom. It’s true for everyone because everyone wants a gift that tells them they are special. For your boss, a handwritten note does the trick. Tell your boss that you appreciate what your boss has done for you over the past year, and that you feel lucky to be working for him or her. Give very specific examples. (Here are tips on how to write that note.)

5. If you want good cheer give good cheer.
You know what? I’m not a Grinch. I’m just pointing out that you are going to be happier if you write a note than if you give a gift, because gratitude is what makes people feel good. Giving it. Giving some material thing does not give you the same jolt of happiness that verbalizing and expressing gratitude does.And receiving material objects is not as gratifying as a thank you note filled with specific examples of how you added meaning to someone’s workday.

First, here is research from James Westphal and Ithai Stern at Kellogg School of Management.  They found that being adept at ingratiating behavior was the number-one factor for getting positions at the top of the corporate ladder.

This is not surprising to me. What is surprising is that the research comes with a how-to provided (perhaps inadvertently) by the American Bar Association Journal.

According to the study, here are the traits that are most likely to be rewarded.

1) Frame flattery as advice-seeking. For example, you can ask, “How were you able to close that deal so successfully?”

2) Argue before accepting a manager’s opinion.

3) Compliment the manager to friends in his or her social network.

4) Act as if you realize that flattery will make the manager uncomfortable. For example, you can say, “I don’t want to embarrass you but your presentation was really top-notch.”

5) Agree with the manager’s values before agreeing with his or her opinions.

6) Tell the manager’s friends how much you agree with his or her values.

7) Bring up affiliations you think you may have in common with the manager, such as a religious group or political party.

To me, this list is incredibly handy. I think maybe people don’t like brown-nosing behavior because they think anyone could do it if they put aside their moral compass.

But this is not true. For many people, brown-nosing is very hard not because it’s immoral per se, but because it's so hard to think of what to say. The nuances required for successful brown-nosing behavior are like trigonometry for your emotions—too complicated to be done on the fly.

I can memorize this list. Or maybe just one or two from the list, and then I can try to say something like this when I want to make someone feel good.

And this is why I don’t understand why people think brown-nosing is compromising their integrity. Brown-nosing is just making someone feel good. Isn’t this always a nice thing to do? How could it ever hurt anyone? What’s the moral objection? I don’t get it.

Also, the American Bar Association essentially defines brown-nosing as “ingratiating behavior.” I looked up ingratiating in the dictionary. The first definition I found was: “To bring (oneself, for example) into the favor or good graces of another, especially by deliberate effort.”

I absolutely don’t understand why this is bad. In fact, I am pretty sure that the reason everyone told me I was terrible at dating was because I was not able to be ingratiatory. You are supposed to be that, right?

So can everyone please shut up about how they are not going to brown-nose? The world would be a better place if we would all do that, all the time. I am not able to do it without extreme coaching, but for those of you who can do it easily, you should feel blessed. And, you’re probably in line for a promotion.

We have been saying this in Brazen Careerist board meetings for about five months. The conversation goes something like this:

Board member: How is the blog redesign going?

Me: Um. I'm thinking.

Board member: That's what you said two months ago.

Me: Yeah. That's true. I'll get some bids.

Board member: It's important the we differentiate the Brazen Careerist brand of the company from the brand of you.

Me: Yeah. I get it.

Then we have a pause in the meeting while everyone is silently frustrated with my inability to make changes.

The truth is that I have always known that I'm going to separate myself from the name Brazen Careerist. I mean, I don't want to be the Brazen Careerist when I'm 70 years old. And anyway, the brand is better for a social network.

So, it's time to take it off my blog. But I'm slow. I'm so slow that I am doing incremental changes as a warm up. And, also, as a way to make the board think that I am not constipated.

So the first change is that I added a section on my blog sidebar titled: My life disguised as career advice. And the list in that section contains topics that make sense for my blog, if it is separate from Brazen Careerist.

I think I will keep rejiggering my sidebar categories. I'm sick of the categories I have had. What's up with time management being a separate category from productivity anyway? What was I thinking?

The other change is that I have agreed to do weekly, live video chats. I want to tell you they will happen at the same time every week, but my life is not so streamlined. Fortunately, Ed, our CEO, who is all over me to start doing these video chats, has come up with the idea that the banner ad on my blog, which surely none of you even notices because it never changes, will now announce the weekly topic and the weekly time.

Frankly, I'm more excited about changing my categories, but I'm also excited about making Ed happy. I have found in my career that the only time I have a good job is when the person who manages me is happy with me. So that's the topic of this week's video chat, Managing Up: How to make your boss love you.

You can sign up here.

Most of us didn’t learn that, though. Because it’s so hard to teach. I know it’s really hard to teach because people with Asperger Syndrome don’t understand how to ask a question, and I watched speech therapists (pragmatics specialists) try to teach my son, while I took notes for myself.

Children with Asperger’s often have to learn when to use Why, What, and Where because they don’t know how to ask questions, even though they often have through-the-roof IQs. They actually seem mentally slow because they cannot learn as fast as other children due to the lack of good questions – which is a great illustration of how important asking questions is.

I will answer almost any question someone asks, which makes me better at asking questions myself, but I am also very conscious of the fact that most questions people ask me are terrible.

So here are tips on how to ask good questions.

1. Trust that people are interesting.
Asperger’s children must learn that everyone can tell you something about the world that you don’t know, and learning things about the world is interesting. As adults, this is more of a respect thing—you need to take a leap of faith that each person deserves your respect and each person has an answer that will be really important to you, if you can just get to the topic they are interesting about. (This is hard when most people want to talk about the weather, or the price of gas or whatever. I am still working on that hurdle.)

2. Use a therapist to teach you to ask questions
Therapists almost never tell you what to do. They ask questions instead. And they ask such good questions that you can’t help learning about yourself. I realized, after about 20 years of therapy, that I had learned to internalize a therapist’s voice in my head—asking myself the questions that could help me to steer myself. So what therapy has taught me is to ask sharp questions of myself when I am lost, and to go back to a therapist when the questions I ask of myself are so broad and unfocused that they are not helping. It makes sense that everyone could do the same thing. And if you think you’re above this strategy, consider this: Companies do this all the time, they just call the temporary help consultants instead of therapists.

3. Recognize questions that are hard for you but easy for everyone else
I just had lunch with one of my board members, Erik. He is the guy the board sends in when I am losing my mind. (He’s the one who fielded the call when I was having a nervous breakdown from funding and maybe going blind.) Anyway, this week I asked Erik what do to because I can’t work because I’m so sad about the farmer breaking off our engagement. Erik told me to keep working. He said, “What else are you going to do?” He was right. The question seemed so large and complicated to me, but it was really that the question was emotionally charged for me. It was not a hard question.

4. Match the right question to the right person.
Seth Godin asked a group of people (including me) a few months ago to write a chapter for a new ebook. Usually stuff like this takes too much time, and, also, it’s usually boring to do. But Seth tailored his question so well that the answers he got were amazing. First, he said he needed “just 200 words.” That’s the amount of words that is easiest to write. Less than that starts looking like poetry and more than that starts being an essay. He also picked a great topic: “what matters now.” Of course, this would not be a good topic for most people. Most people would stress about it for months before deciding what matters now. But Seth asked people who ask themselves this question every day, and write about it every day. (Arianna Huffington, Dan Pink, Fred Wilson, for example) And he made answering fun, because, look, I love  how this ebook turned out.

5. A question you never think of is one of the best surprises of all.
Tyler Cowen’s book, Create Your Own Economy is largely about getting a life in the information age. But he spends a lot of time talking about how interestingness in life might be an end in itself. I am not totally convinced of this because I think I’m long on interestingness and short on social skills and I’m not liking the balance. And I think, maybe if I could just be a little less interesting then things might be easier for me. But, anyway, Tyler is convinced, and Tyler is pretty darn interesting, and he makes me think that one of the things that most excites me is when I hear someone asking a great question that I had not thought of.

So here’s a question for today: We know that women get more interviews if the name on their resume sounds male. (Here's one of a bazillion studies.) And we know that people do better in their careers if they are honest about who they are. (This applies to both your name and your sex orientation.) But here’s something I never thought of: What would it be like to pretend to be a man at work?

One thing I’ve learned on this blog, though, is that most of my personal qualities that feel weird to me are actually pretty common traits among thinking people who desire self-knowledge. So to those people, I hope this blog gives you a sense of fitting in.

And, here are three workplace issues that I wonder if you think about as much as I do.

1. Having a huge crush on your boss.

Seriously, I have never worked for a guy for more than three months without developing a huge crush. This is, in part, because I have been fired so often that any guy I did not last three months with probably fired me and probably had no synergy with me.

But the bosses I did well with, I developed mad crushes on. All of them. Of course, I have worked always for good-looking men. (But, statistically, most of us have good-looking bosses.) I have always grown more attracted to my boss as we did better in the business. And I have noticed that it snowballs: The better we did together the more attracted I became, and the more attracted I was, the more tuned in I was to his thinking, and that made me better at work.

I have never slept with a boss. I like to think that I would have said no. (Though I’m not sure.) But I did find, through advice and personal experience, that women who work for men who are attracted to them have a little bit of power from that attraction. But the women lose that power if they give in and sleep with the guy. This seems right. (Hopefully you will all provide great case studies in the comments.)

2. Not knowing whether a meeting is a date.

Recently I met a guy for lunch. On the weekend. He is a big name. Big enough that developers have wet dreams about meeting him in person. Big enough that one of the first things he said to me when I met him was that I can’t use his name in a blog post.  So I’m not telling who he is, but it’s just as well, because while his email was innocuous, the farmer happened to read it and said, “This guy wants to get in your pants.”

I pointed out to the farmer that the email could have been written exactly the same way if Mr. King-of-Developers had been sending it to a guy.

The farmer didn’t care. Maybe the farmer is uppity because he also sent a sort-of innocuous email to me in order to get me to come to his farm, and, presumably, date him. So maybe he would know what that kind of email looks like.

I never know. One time I thought it was a date and the guy really just wanted to know what I was like in person. He genuinely had no romantic interest in me even though he took me to a restaurant that seemed to specialize in romantic dinners.

But it’s nearly impossible to tell for sure. I am a single woman, and when I get an email from a single guy who just wants to get together and meet because we both know we are both interesting, well, who knows if it is a date or not? And really, it doesn’t matter. I mean, we do the same thing at a business lunch and a date: figure out if we like talking enough to talk more.

So I just usually try to ignore that I never know if something is a date or not. But I have to say that the King of Developers was cute and fun and interesting and am I the only woman in the world who has this problem? No, right? But why aren’t people talking about it more?

3. Figuring out what to wear to the office at 10pm.

Since I’m at a startup, and I also work odd hours, I find myself in the office at odd hours. For example, I often leave work in the afternoon to pick up my kids, so it seems reasonable that if people want to meet with me later, after the kids are in bed, I say yes.

But I go running at night. And one thing I know about myself is that if I don’t put on running clothes before 9pm, I’ll never actually go running. So what do I wear to a 10pm meeting? Running clothes, of course.

I run a lot late at night, and I usually run in very dumpy clothes. After all, the only people seeing me at that hour are potential rapists. (Note to women: You are more likely to get attacked while running if you wear a pony tail. So I never do.)  But if I go to work first, I feel like I need to look good in the running clothes. So, I confess to wearing Lululemon brand pants because they make my butt look so good. Well, not just my butt, but every butt in New York City. And San Francisco, and Boulder, and everywhere else where women who have enough money to prop up their butt for on-lookers do so.

But I feel a bit guilty. Of course workout clothes are not appropriate for work. But it’s 10pm. And the people at work at 10pm are often about to spend the night at the office and they’ll smell bad the next morning. And that’s not appropriate either, but just in a different way.

As a gen-Xer, I am a master of recessionary times: I graduated into one of the worst job markets since the depression and then lived through the dot-com bust.

But since we're not actually in bad times right now, the question really is, what do you do in a job you have if you want to get ready for a downswing in the economy?  Here are four ways to prepare for a job market that might turn sour:

1.  Specialize
People think that if there are fewer jobs, a wide range of skills makes someone more employable. It's not the case, though. In a tight job market, employers can hold out for the perfect fit. And if you are not clearly defined as a specialist, then you are not going to be a perfect fit for anything.

Researchers have found that you get the most benefits from specializing after you have three to five years of experience under your belt. So don't specialize too early – because you won't have learned enough about what you want. But if you have a few years of experience, and you see layoffs looming, try to get on some focused, short-term projects that will allow you to market yourself as a specialist in something when you have to get your next job.  

2. Do something great – right now
Most people have been participants in the last decade of manic job hopping. Which means most people have followed a pattern of performing well at a company, writing those achievements on their resume, and then making the next hop. This works in a job market where you can control when you leave.

But if you get laid off before you accomplish something significant, you will end up with a dark spot on your resume – a place where you did not do anything particularly notable.

So do something now, fast, that you will be able to quantify as an achievement on your resume – as in completed X project in X percent less time than anticipated, or saved X dollars by working twice as fast as normal.

3. Consider graduate school
There's a reason why so many Generation Xers went to graduate school: There were no jobs in the early '90s. In a down job market, grad school is a way to enhance your skills when there are no available jobs that will do that.

One of the most popular choices is law school because a law firm provides a clear path (and an A in organic chemistry is not a pre-requisite). I have never been a fan of law school as a fall-back plan, because 44% of practicing lawyers recommend that you do not go into the field.

That said, law firms have become much more accepting of people's personal lives since the last recession. Many law firms have retooled how they operate to give people more time to have a life outside work, and they have changed their policies to accommodate different stages of life.

Grad school is a treacherous route, though: Be careful about spending money for a degree with no career path to follow it. But also, be careful of investing in a career path you wouldn't want to follow.

(Hat tip: Elise)

4. Focus on the quality of work and quality of mentoring
The hardest thing to do in a bad job market is to keep your learning curve high. If the market goes sour, instead of focusing on the perfect industry or the perfect company, focus on developing new skills. And then refocus your career into a more suitable industry or location when the job market gets better.

By cultivating a great mentor in your current job, you can make your job a spot where you can wait out an economic slump should one come. So instead of focusing on the negative predictions of economic doom, focus on the positive conversations that build a solid mentoring relationship, and you will weather the storm better because you won't weather it alone.

By Susan Johnston - It's easy to get screwed when you're fresh out of undergrad and starting a new job. Nobody tells you this, because it doesn't make a particularly inspiring message for a graduation speech or greeting card. But it's true. In college, you had professors to encourage intellectual exploration and advisors to make sure you stayed on track for graduation.

Unfortunately, in the workforce your boss is looking out for the bottom line and you don't automatically get assigned to someone who will look out for your best interests (you have to find your own mentors and even then they could have their own agenda). I graduated a year early, so I was especially eager and open to managerial manipulations. So, class of 2008, here are some situations to look out for.

1. You could get screwed on a project basis.
If you don't know what you want from your job, then how can you expect anyone else to know what kind of work to give you? It's not your employer's job to help you find yourself, so if you don't have a clear picture of what you want to do, then you are an easy target for tasks that no one else wants to do. Not every manager is good at delegating or figuring out other people's strengths, so the employees who know what they want and ask for it make their managers' lives easier. Those who don't, get stuck with the leftovers.

2. You could get screwed out of money.
In the past, I've been promised raises, and I failed to get it in writing because I trusted my bosses. The first time, I was working at a taco stand over the summer and my manager got fired a week later, meaning I missed out on that extra 25 cents an hour (tragic, I know). The second time my boss gave me a verbal raise but never told accounting. I straightened it out a few paychecks later, but I should have emailed him to confirm immediately after our meeting and avoided the confusion later. Another unfortunate salary manipulation is what I call the preemptive raise. Basically, you get a small raise when you're not expecting it and they know that you won't try to negotiate. But you should always negotiate so that you establish yourself as someone who knows what they're worth.

3. You could screw up your image.
People worry about the stigma of job hopping, but sometimes it's the only way to gain respect. Say you were interning somewhere and got offered a full time job at the company. Your parents would be elated, but I would caution you not to jump in without weighing your options. First of all, you'll always be remembered as the Intern, so people will continue asking you to fetch coffee and locate office supplies. My first job out of college was as an admin but a new position opened within a few months and I grabbed it. Even a year after I'd moved up, people still treated me like the receptionist because that's what I was doing when they met me. If your company thinks you're worthy of a full time job, then trust your abilities and someone else will offer you a position with more money and more respect as well.

4. You could get screwed into working evenings and weekends.
If you don't have 2.5 kids and a spouse waiting at home, then in many industries, you'll be expected to put in extra hours (and no, you don't necessarily get comp time or overtime). It's not fair, but that's just how it is. Take it from someone who didn't have time to date her first year out of college, because she was running around helping at events on Friday and Saturday nights. I suggest you put in the extra time when you can so that no one can fault you when you have a family commitment or a friend's birthday party. After all, you have outside obligations, too. Don't let your eagerness to please prevent you from having a life.

5. You could get screwed by lack of feedback.
Lots of managers are uncomfortable giving feedback (especially negative), so they'll avoid it if at all possible. For example, I once had a manager say to me "annual reviews are coming up in a month, but since you just started, we'll wait until next year." Fourteen months passed before I had a performance review, and I was blindsided by some of the comments I got, because no one brought up issues that had been going on for over a year! You can't fix it if you don't know it's broken, so you should take it upon yourself to check in with your boss periodically and avoid any surprises at your review. You could even ask what you need to do in the next six months to qualify for a raise. They may not give you clear directions, but at least you'll show that you want to excel in your job.

Susan Johnston's blog is The Urban Muse.

Well, all workers who aren't at the top of the ladder, anyway. Those at the top surely think keeping the ladder there is a good idea, because what was the point of their climb if no one is climbing up after them?

Fortunately, there are ways to circumvent this way of thinking. You can't change corporate structures and procedures, but you can sidestep them in a way that gets you more interesting work and higher pay without having to trudge up an anachronistic ladder. Here are two. Read the rest at Yahoo Finance:

Get on a team.
"Teamwork" is one of the big corporate buzzwords of the last two decades. This is because companies with effective teams do better than companies without them.

The problem is that baby boomers never learned to play on teams. They're the consummate competitors, born into a demographic in which there were always too many candidates for every position. Boomers are thus keen competitors, measuring each other up for everything. So the data that showed the importance of teams was followed quickly by a round of consulting companies specializing in teaching people how to be in multidisciplinary, non-hierarchical teams.

Then came Generation Y, the best team players in history. They did book reports in teams, went shopping in groups — they're so team-oriented they even went to the prom in packs.

Put these two groups in a room and tell them to be a team, and you know what happens? The young people run circles around the older ones. The older workers try to establish a hierarchy while the younger ones are oblivious because they're busy tossing out ideas.

A messy scene, for sure, but this is the way to get heard, and this is the way to shine outside the hierarchy: Get on a team, speak your mind, and implement your ideas — all while the baby boomers are worrying about hierarchy.

Start your own business.
You don't need a lot of money to start your own company, because most of the tools to open up shop online are free. And in most cases, marketing is cheap and easy if you can establish a viral networking effect among your friends. This is why, in the short time that Generation Y has been in the workforce, they've already made a mark as a generation of entrepreneurs.

In addition to being fast and easy to do, starting a company lets you do interesting work you can control without having to wait to get to the top of a corporate ladder. Some people quit their jobs to start a company while others run theirs on the weekend. Increasingly, however, people are running a company from their corporate cubicle.

Read the rest at Yahoo Finance.

Even worse, it's a losing battle. Generation Y is huge. It's one thing for boomers to verbally squash Generation X — that was no problem. Gen X is tiny and the baby boom was huge.

But in Generation Y, baby boomers have met their match. And in the demographic catfight of the century, Gen X aligns itself with Gen Y over baby boomers, which means that the workplace gripes boomers have about young people are going to be moot in a matter of years.

So maybe the over-40 crowd should spend less time talking about trying to "bridge the generation gap" — which is really a euphemism for "get Gen Y to be more like us" — and more time celebrating the great things that Generation Y brings to the workplace. Gen Y isn't going anywhere, and it's not like they're about to conform to baby boomer demands.

But before you continue reading, understand that the world doesn't actually adhere to demographer datelines: The generation you fit into is more a function of the choices you make than the year you were born. So if you want to know where you truly fit along generational lines, take this test.

And if you want to know why baby boomers should ease up on Generation Y, consider the ways that these youngest workers are making life better for everyone:

Read the rest at Yahoo Finance