I definitely belong to the word-as-symbol camp when reading in my native Norwegian. Besides, I am a programmer (A shoddy one in all but assembly language, though...)

Interestingly, perhaps, is that I recently made the transition from word-as-sound to word-as-symbol in another language - morse code; that felt very odd while it was going on - I have parsed words character by character for a couple of decades, and suddenly, I found my decoding lagging further behind - I had started hearing words as units, rather than composites of characters. Funnily enough, it was through no conscious effort - just happened, over the course of a few hours.