If you are doing any serious development in Unity, you will be programming and so your skills will likely come into use day-in, day-out. Maybe some of what you

If you are doing any serious development in Unity, you will be programming and so your skills will likely come into use day-in, day-out. Maybe some of what you will do will be higher-level than if you were writing an engine from scratch, but that isn't necessarily true and isn't necessarily bad. In many ways, Unity does a pretty decent job of letting you go lower-level when you need to, but not requiring it of you all the time. Maybe rendering is a good example of this. Unity ships with a bunch of built-in materials and shaders and has surface shaders to abstract away some aspects of writing custom shaders. But there are cases where you need something a little less mainstream, and you can write CG or HLSL if you need to. Just like you can also manage sending data directly to the card if you need to... or you can let renderer components on your objects handle things. The nice thing is that in 99% of cases, when you don't need to -- you don't have to.