At my jobs, the overwhelming majority of code does simple, well-defined tasks. Writing that code is dead simple, so I get it done reasonably quickly, which is a lot more quickly than the overwhelming majority of my coworkers.

Here are a few of my guesses as to why lots of people are so slow at writing dead simple code, and why I'm faster at it than they are.

• They make it more complicated than it should be.
• They don't know the code well enough not to reimplement stuff that is already there.
• At design meetings, while I tune out stuff that doesn't involve what I'll be working on, when the discussion does involve what I'll be working on, I'll advocate designs that are easy to implement and fit in the existing design.
• When adding new features, I'll implement them in a general enough way to make similar future new features easy to add. (And, often, when other people do it, they reimplement it anyhow, instead of taking advantage what I've done.)
• I'm not terribly fast at typing, but I use many emacs features to speed things up. For example, I use forward-list and backward-list all the time for navigation instead of hitting the arrow keys lots of times. I use backward-kill-word instead of backspacing lots of times. I use universal-argument to do things multiple times. I use keyboard macros and hippie-expand (but not together) for repetitive stuff.