[tombert]

I think it's still a little better. You probably get a bit of noise isolation that you wouldn't otherwise have.

At Apple, whenever I had to fly to California, they had similar glass offices like this, and I was always amazed at how well they actually isolated sound. People would chat in the office, and you'd only hear some muffled speech, which wasn't really enough to be distracting. I cannot speak for Stackexchange but presumably they use similar styles of glass office?