Early in my career I was mostly writing single use programs, so my focus was more on which programming language to use. As I moved into bigger teams and projects, the focus shifted from programming languages to processes and methods. Reuse, scheduling, and productivity all became more important to be in focus. Software team management became more interesting, but in seeing how little autonomy my managers possessed, it never became a destination goal.
At this last stage of my career, I have never seen an objective choice on methods, processes, or even programming languages be made. Thus my focus has switched more to software metrics. I have my own subjective preferences in some areas of software development (some of which appear to be strongly correlated by existing metrics data), but without metrics we are all chickens running around with our heads cut off.
