Will learning TD make me hot stuff in the job market?

I’ll be spending time learning TD no matter what, but since it’s nice to earn money to pay the rent and bills, and support local art and science projects, I wonder how I might get paid to do stuff with TD.

How quickly would I be snatched up by some employer? Is TD and some general art, graphics and front end skills a sufficient combination to land a good job? Would there usually be some expectation that would be expert at some other tool? Is there anything vital that ought to be on my resume besides “self-studying TouchDesigner”? What kind of portfolio should I build up?

What are some stats for existing TD designers? Do TD experts make income from full time positions, freelancing, working through an agency, or what? If you do gigs, how much downtime is there between?

Do potential clients who could be using TD even know it exists? Is there a huge demand for TD users of all skill levels but too few of us to go around, so we can routinely command upper six digit incomes? :slight_smile:

It’s not the answers to these specific questions that I’m after, but a big-picture view of what TD might mean for career choices. The questions are samples of the things I wonder about.

Seems like TD has found its way into alot of production quality environments. Television production, experiential agencies, threatre and staging (amongst others). Its still quite a specialised software with a variety of applications and perhaps a niche user base. Getting a job or term contract as a TD developer is getting more frequent, but still a numbers game in terms of regular requests and abundance of choice.

But you can use it in your own contract works, I believe that is where it is used most widely. Someone who specialises in x field will use TD in their workflow. I would say that’s probably where most of the commercial use is for the application. I’d say, work on what you’re passionate about. Software is an enabler but folio and knowledge might help you develop your niche in whatever industry or environment. Working freelance I feel is quite a tricky thing. You’re either flooded in work or waiting for the next job / pay cheque to come in. But many seem to do this reasonably well once they’ve established a name and network for themselves. Perhaps the biggest profiteers are those in major production environments with big budgets and teams.

To be brief, TouchDesigner has a lot of “artists” and not enough “developers”.

I’m not going to pigeon hole what an artist is, everyone’s got their own skill sets.

But developers know the ins and out of TouchDesigner (especially the really menial stuff), can build anything in TouchDesigner not just cool stuff, know their hardware as if their company made it, know how to optimize their work, know how to troubleshoot unpredictable bugs, can guarantee no stuttering and tearing, know how to communicate clearly and concisely and promptly, know when to not say anything in front of your client’s client, can guarantee deliverables/quotes/schedules, and don’t crack under extremely high pressure.

If you’re a developer, you’ll have gigs, some will be unglamorous, but you’ll have gigs. If you’re an artist, you have to hope your cool thing is cooler than everyone else’s cool things.

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You hit the nail on the head Elburz! :wink:

Well then, this is what I’ll aim for. I have worked on the innards of graphics applications a long time, including writing a CAD app from scratch, adding rendering features to POV-Ray (does anyone use that anymore?) and writing a plug-in for Photoshop to read image files from the rover on Mars. Developing for graphics, imaging and animation apps seems to be the main thread in my career.

I think it’d be great to concoct new operators, stretch the capabilities of what TD can do.