Me, I can deal with sound in general, and I even like to listen to music while I work. What really messes me up is words - people talking, music with lyrics, stuff like that makes it very difficult for me to get my work done. Strong rhythms are also a bit of a challenge. So the sounds of people walking are tricky, my mechanical watch needs to go into a drawer if the room is particularly quiet, and the music generally needs to be something classical.
But there's also a threshold where there's so much cacophony going on that my brain just gives up and tunes it all out, and I'm back to my productive zone. When my coworking space is starting to get a bit too noisy for me to concentrate even with my headphones on, I typically deal with it by packing up and going to a nearby coffee shop that I can trust to always be busy.
But "Hey, how about that game last night!" behind me and...
LizardBrain: "pattern identified: human speech. Attempting to parse...colloquialisms not found...setting parsing process to 'high' priority...audio sensitivity set to 100%."
ConciousBrain: "nooooo, I don't give flying shite about the SeaPigeons! Trying to work here!"
Working in an open office where the main language is a language that you understand well, but not natively (my every day life in Germany): you spend a ton of cognitive energy tuning it out, because your lizard brain insists on having that surrounding speech parsed first, just in case it has something to do with your work, because every so often, it absolutely does.
Working in an open office where you have absolutely no comprehension of the language (two weeks in Seoul): amazingly productive, because the lizard brain doesn't even bother.
Additionally, I have a really hard time focusing without _any_ music. Typically I need some beat to be able to get in the zone at all. It doesn't matter what the beat is - EDM, ska, soundtracks, lo-fi beats to study to, but there needs to be something.
As someone who has worked as a mechanic professionally, and now slings code for a living, I'll take a whack. You've put a set of brakes on a Chevy, you've put brakes on about all of them. Hell, put disc brakes on a car of any make, and you've got the general idea. I'm not saying it's not a tough job, hey, I've been there. But he nature of the work is different. What makes an alignment hard is not the same as what makes implementing this piece of code hard. What makes an alignment hard is frozen fasteners and having to go reference the manual because Mercedes decided that fifty years of prior art on caster adjustment just wasn't good enough for them, and invented their own. What makes this morning's software task difficult is that, though similar work has been done, no one has had to make it work quite like I need to do today (otherwise, I'd just buy something off the shelf). I'm making a new invention; not on the scale of the light bulb, but it's still new and there is no reference manual.
So, in the shop I can be fine with lots of noise and music as m 3/8" air ratchet backs out the brake caliper bolts. I don't need to concentrate on that much, I'm not going to bring the whole shop down if I screw it up. Pull the bolts, pull the caliper like I've done a hundred times. That Mercedes alignment, yeah, I might turn the radio down while I think about what I'm doing. But an oil change? Crank it up! (But even for an oil change, I recall having forgotten the drain bolt before putting in oil at least once.)
Software, OTOH, I need to mentally hold fleeting abstractions in my head. Someone droning on about the fscking SeaPigeons game on Sunday can easily break the tenuous grasp I had. I didn't even like being interrupted in the middle of a brake job if I were in the flow, but at least the brakes are right there in front of me when I have to go back to it. Not so with that algorithm for...oh, what the hell was it?
In summary, the nature of the work is quite different, such that mechanical work can be more interrupt-tolerant than software work.