Youth in the workplace is a blessing and a curse. There's a fine line between being a go-getter and impetuousness.

The X and Y Generations have a particularly bad reputation for wanting it all now. But, as the Baby Boomers hit retirement age, companies increasingly have to look for its next group of leaders and that means putting some of those fresh faces on a career fast track.

A new CareerBuilder survey of more than 5,200 workers shows that is indeed happening - and that it's not without its problems. Forty-three percent of workers ages 35 and older said they currently work for someone younger than them. And more than half (53 percent) of workers ages 45 and up said they have a boss younger than them, followed by 69 percent of workers ages 55 and up.

The workplace is a pretty darn unpleasant place to be these days. In case you hadn't noticed.

That, at least, is the conclusion reached by two recent studies.

Employers beware: Hiring illegals could cost you big-time. This is the message sent from a recent agreement between Pilgrim's Pride and the federal government.

Everywhere you look, there's another study revealing low morale among employees. Lest you thought such down-in-the-doldrums attitudes didn't matter--after all, by many accounts productivity has been skyrocketing--you should consider the results of a paper about to be published in the Strategic Management Journal.

According to a preview of the findings in the New York Times , companies where employees had a more positive opinion of the business than customers also experienced stronger sales growth. Researchers, who looked at 4,307 customers and employees at 56 branches of 9 companies, discovered the following surprising results: There was a 9 percent drop in sales at companies where employees regard their employer much less favorably than customers, and a 7.46 percent increase in sales at firms where employees like the company a lot more than the public.

Women may make up close to 50% of the workforce. But, there's still a lot of Mars. vs. Venus happening at work when it comes to a great many issues. That is, men and women could be on different planets in their approaches to everything from how they recover from conflict to their views on how to get ahead.

Some of the differences are pretty stark, according to a survey of 615  employees conducted by Cisco and a firm called Gender IQ. While the study was done in the UK, which has about the same percentage of women in the workplace, it has a lot of implications for the U.S., too.