[gwc]

There are other types of relevant diversity, however. The authors speak directly to "functional" diversity, which they describe as "differences in how people represent problems and how they go about solving them".

In the context of wanting to write the next Digg, I would propose that a better application of their conclusions would be, e.g., to favor hiring programmers from different schools over hiring programmers who went to the same school and studied under the same professors. In this way you might get some diversity in terms of how your programmers approach solving problems versus having a group of programmers who each approach a given problem in the same way and presumably reach the same conclusions / solutions.

[DanielBMarkham]

I agree. And it's not just types of analytical processing. How about hiring programmers who represent major different personality types, which have an innate difference in how they both perceive and respond to problems? Language knowledge, social skills, and algorithm construction is a given.