I'm a programmer / architect at PayPal. I work in the core User model area -- so I also am part Data Architect. I'm most familiar with C++, Perl, and Oracle SQL. On the side, I play with VBA for Excel and PHP.

I think the most important lesson for programmers to learn is to respect the semantic intent of their data. (Data in the DB, but also just the variables and parameters in your code.) The more data-centric your are in your coding the cleaner and more maintainable your resulting code will be.