[Corrado]

I think one of my best working environments had two pods of 4 people each in one closed off room. One pod had developers and the other had non developers (project leaders, DBAs, etc.) It combined just the right amount of togetherness and separate space and worked wonderfully!

Another great environment was inside an old bank vault. Me and one other developer. No windows, two doors, lights down low, thumping techno music. Ah, bliss...

[ericd]

Nice, I like 4, that's the number we had at my last startup, and it worked well. I figured that the max reasonable team size was 8, but I think your solution (two rooms of 4) strikes a nice balance of noise and allowing the entire team to be very close to each other when they need to be.