Ewan Oughton,Graduate Software Developer, IBM

Degree subject BSc Computer Systems (2005)
Job title Graduate Software Developer
Employer IBM

I'm part of the Deep Computing Visualisation team here. Our product has two parts – one allows graphics applications to be displayed on a 'video wall' without any loss in quality through hardware clustering. This is called Scaleable Visual Networking. The other is called Remote Visual Networking – this allows resource-intensive 3D applications to be rendered on one machine and displayed on another; for instance an engineer out in the desert could remotely render complex geographical information on a server and have the results displayed on their laptop. IBM has a DCV research project in the US; they recruited me and several other programmers when the project was moved to Ireland. I applied after spending several months working for a Linux testing company. I'm the Linux specialist on the team, currently working on support for extra operating systems. My experience with Linux came not just from my degree, but also from volunteering as a systems administrator in the computer society in university – it's a good idea to join university clubs as mine helped me get my job!

The best part of my job is the chance to work with cutting-edge hardware and technology – it's a world away from day-to-day hardware. I feel positive about my future career prospects as well. In many firms, promotions mean moving to a purely managerial role; whereas in IBM you can gain promotion and remain in a technical role.