In big companies, talented people leave programming to do architecture and project lead - you're likely to find these guys in teams that are bound to executives and senior managers.
If you work for a big comp, get a clear idea of what role you want to have: support? IT? development? tech consulting? From there try to find single persons that do well, they probably have interesting connections.
Thanks for the advice! I'm actually a Mechanical Engineer and have mostly worked for R&D so far. Also, me and most people in robotics spend most of their time programing, they are not trained programmers. Unfortunately many use this as an excuse to keep writing crappy code instead of trying to catch up with the state of the art. Heck, right now I'm the only one in my group who uses version control ...
If you work for a big comp, get a clear idea of what role you want to have: support? IT? development? tech consulting? From there try to find single persons that do well, they probably have interesting connections.