At my old company, before we moved into a bigger, modern space where all developers fit in the same huge room, we were all split into 3 or 4 different spaces. At first I was in this room with another 8-10 developers. We would have conversations through the day. Sometimes technical but offtopic, sometimes about our infrastructure (someone helping someone else fix a bug) and sometimes just plain offtopic/fun. For some reason I moved to a different room with different developers around me. Soon, I learned that that whole "talk normally while people beside you are working" thing wasn't the norm there, so I stopped, and it was quite a "library rules" place to work, to describe it using the article's words. Now, I was sad to lose all those conversations, but I became a heck of a lot more productive.