Nobody's using Unicode, as far as my life is concerned. Which is a bonus for me, because it means I haven't had to learn how to do Unicode.
What we do, by preference, is reverse-engineer file formats. This statement tends to generate two distinct responses. Most people's eyes glaze over; the few who understand it tend to sneer openly. At length, what we do is figure out how your X program (CAD, word processing, drawing, whatever) decides what the contents of a file mean, and then write a parser -- a program or module which converts the contents of the file into a useful form.
We rarely reverse-engineer code, for several reasons. First, it's rarely useful. Second, it's risky: simply decompiling object code appears to be a violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), and even if that weren't the case, most software licenses explicitly prohibit decompilation. Finally, we don't have any skill or interest in reverse-engineering code, so we'd probably do a lousy job and not enjoy it.
Reverse-engineeing files is legal. We're always under the "for reasons of compatibility" banner, which is explicitly written into the law. But even without that, we're generally safe. The files belong to the client; unlike the code, which is merely licensed to the client by the vendor. The client has the right to dispose of its property as it wishes, including sending it to us to be reverse-engineered. Often the client's aim is to get away from the vendor, but that doesn't affect us.
Of course, the DMCA may make it more difficult for us to reverse-engineer certain files. I believe that DMCA holds that circumventing any deliberate countermeasure against reverse-engineering is tortious. Any one -- no matter how trivial -- such as shifting each alphabetic letter thirteen places over. Some vendors, such as Adobe, have started to do precisely this. Luckily, DMCA seems to be a dead letter, thanks to jury nullification. But it was scary for a while.
Anyway, I was going to ramble about Unicode, instead of what I do to earn my living. But now my niece wants to use her computer, so I'll get off.