I realise my post was a little unclear.<p>Yes, often they&#x27;d carry on a conversation between themselves, which was an interruption, but was a symptom of the poorly designed office space. It&#x27;s hardly their fault that their job and&#x2F;or personality thrives on conversation. That was why the engineering team wanted a separate quiet work space for our team, so they could do their thing without breaking the productivity of the dev team.<p>But what I meant with <i>They&#x27;d walk into the office and immediately start up some useless conversation</i> was that they&#x27;d start it with <i>us</i>. Partly because they wanted conversation but also because they thought it was good for us. That the office was too quiet and we needed to liven it up a bit. That the reason we weren&#x27;t talking is because we needed someone to break the ice for us.<p>That failure to understand what makes an engineering team productive led them to try and do things that were totally counter-productive, but they just didn&#x27;t see it. It&#x27;s in that context that they really needed to <i>just stop</i>.