Reminds me of working at Worksmart Labs/Noom. They had a noisy open plan office, but still felt they should max out the stars on the Joel test in their hiring ads for giving programmers a quiet working environment. If you are going to have an open plan office, it is a cost cutting measure. That's it. Being honest about a lack or fault is better than lying about it. Good to see a startup doing things right in this article!
I don't think it's cost cutting - the price of office space is far outweighed by knowledge worker salaries. I think it's a whole range of factors, but the largest is this: when a tech company becomes successful, they grow fast and are too busy to do a search for a proper office. So you see a lot of successful tech companies with tight, open layouts. Then you simply confuse causation and correlation and say "oh it must be their cross team communication!"
In some places natural light is legally mandated, hard to use a large chunk of floorspace, have natural light and give everybody a room of their own at the same time. Especially older buildings can't be adapted to this.
