Just got hired to a new gig and determined to wow the higher ups? The Freakonomics blog has tips. The blog from the authors of the best-selling book recently cross-posted a list of ten tips for job starters with the blog of hedge fund manager James Altucher.

In it the investor and author offers a lengthy list of suggestions he learned in his days designing websites for HBO that can help you stand out from the very first day on the job. Here are three of the best:

Love the product. You have to love the current output of the company. If you work at HBO, love the shows. Watch every single show. No excuses. If you work at WD-40, know every use of WD-40. Make up a few more that nobody ever thought of. If you work at Otis Elevators, understand all the algorithms for how the elevator decides which floors to stop on when. If you work at Goldman Sachs, read every book on the history, study every deal they��ve done, know Lloyd Blankfein��s favorite hobbies and how he rose through the ranks.? You have to love the product the way Andre Agassi loves playing tennis or Derek Jeter loves playing baseball.

Know the history of the executives. At HBO, I studied the org chart religiously. My title was ��programmer analyst, IT department�� and yet I was always asking around: how did John Billock become head of marketing (he trudged around house to house selling HBO subscriptions in Louisiana when Showtime started up, for instance, decades earlier). Where did my boss��s boss��s boss��s boss work before arriving at HBO (Pepsi). Where did the head of Original Programming get his start? (He was a standup comedian, later CEO of HBO, before being forced to quit after choking his girlfriend in a Las Vegas parking lot.)

Constantly test your value on the market. The job market is like any other market. There��s supply and demand. And you��re just an item for sale at the great bazaar. Every year you need to find out what your value is on the market. For one thing, the best way to get an increase in salary and status is to move horizontally, not vertically. Second, you don��t want to get inbred. A good friend of mine was in HBO��s marketing department for 17 years. I set up a dinner between her, me, and the CEO of an advertising agency that was hiring. The CEO was one of my closest friends. Still, she couldn��t hire my HBO friend. ��She��s too inbred,�� she said. ��She will never be able to get the HBO way of doing things out of her head.�� When I was at HBO, I was constantly talking to people at other companies. I had lunch with the top people at Showtime. I would get offers from the banking industry. Every time I got another offer, I got another raise and promotion at HBO.

For the remaining seven ideas, check out the complete post. What do you make of these tips? They seem sensible to me, but the first one does beg the question of what to do if you’re offered a job at a company whose products fail to get your excited (assuming you’re not the type of person whose value judgments are infinitely flexible in pursuit of success). Would Altucher say you should turn it down? What’s your view on this question — should you ever take a job with a company if you’re not a fan of the products?

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