And while yes, some discussions will still take place outside of the chat rooms, if this is your default way of working then there should be enough discussion of anything critical that everything makes it's way to chat eventually.
Once everyone's comfortable working this way you can encourage a lot more working from home (or working from wherever in the world you want to be, if your employees aren't all married with kids yet), etc. And that will save you even more on office space.
I thought the "light on two sides" was particularly clever.
One thing holding back enclosed offices in SF is the very high ceilings in many of the older buildings. would high walled cubes work?
> The monthly rent for our offices, when fully occupied, will run about $700 per employee.
That's $8,400 per year in Manhattan.
And these are shots from their new Denver office: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stackexchange/7776308984/in/set... http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/09/join-us-for-our-openin...
tl;dr there is at least some open-plan stuff. Which, really, just makes the most sense; a healthy mix of options is hard to argue with.
Here's the simple algebra. Let's say (as the evidence seems to suggest) that if we interrupt a programmer, even for a minute, we're really blowing away 15 minutes of productivity. For this example, lets put two programmers, Jeff and Mutt, in open cubicles next to each other in a standard Dilbert veal-fattening farm. Mutt can't remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he's sitting right next to Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds)."
(From http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000068.html)