(author of the article) 100% agree. As others have said, a good graphics programmer works with tech artists and artists. Frankly, graphics programming is largely a role of service to enable those people to do what they want to do, or help create what they envision. People mentioned Inigo Quilez as an example of a graphics programmer who is also an artist. He is a power house and a unicorn. I personally like playing music / programming audio more, which is a good ground for learning DSP things - useful when for instance, you want to push your rendering noise into the high frequencies, so a low pass filter is more effective at denoising.