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I doubt it’s just one chemical, but various kinds of plastics and adhesives, and possibly some electronic components are all likely contributors. For example, on the 8th gen. iPad, the keyboard connector is surprisingly smelly.

Heat increases the rate of offgassing, so a medium amount of heat in well power managed devices can draw out the time for which there is noticeable offgassing for years. I have found if you can burn-in a computer or TV with heavy load (and consequently heat) for say a month or two, that usually takes care of it. But some mobile devices (especially fanless ones) are “too good” at thermal management, making this difficult. And even for devices with fans, you want to run them in a clean environment so you don’t prematurely fill the fans up with dust or worse.

Have you tested the laptop’s materials for offgassing?

I’ve had problems with offgassing odors that never seem to go away on multiple monitors, MacBooks and an iPad in recent years. This leads to headaches that makes it impossible to use the machines for more than a few minutes, even with good room ventilation.

It would be great to buy a laptop that is known to be low offgassing. I was wondering if a Framework laptop would have less glue and could be more effective offgassed in a shed by disassembling the components and ventilating.

Another thing to keep in mind is title inflation.

The role that most companies these days call “Senior Software Engineer” is actually an intermediate-level role (e.g., 5 years of experience). Staff is arguably where the actual senior-level roles start. This corresponds with the transition from being told what to do to being told to figure out what needs to be done and make it happen.

Interesting question. As someone else pointed out, TPM is a role more like what you’re describing.

For Staff+ engineers, communication and high level architecture are just the tip of the iceberg. You have to understand the problem domain and the solution domain, be able to come up with good technical solutions (which is generally a collaborative process), and sell others on these ideas. Then you have to follow through with implementing them yourself and leading others working with you on them. If you don’t have the technical depth to understand the details, you’re not going to succeed at that. If you haven’t already internalized a lot of the details through your past work, you’re not going to have enough time to both learn the technical details and do all the communication, implementation and other parts of your job.