Run for the hills. Take the first job you can get doing real work. You'll make yourself crazy otherwise. I'm at the point where I've had some good jobs and so

Run for the hills. Take the first job you can get doing real work. You'll make yourself crazy otherwise. I'm at the point where I've had some good jobs and some bad ones. In every single one of the bad ones, I could tell you exactly the same story you've shared above. You've been hired, these guys are "ramping up" but have no idea where they are really going and zero expectation that you can help them get there. Here's the thing that I've found - it's a huge red flag if you see a smart and capable person not really doing anything. Something is wrong organizationally and you can't fix it. On several teams, I found myself defending managers or the "people in control" saying to myself and others things like "their vision is good, we just need to pull it together." Or "so-and-so is really smart, but needs to figure out how to better sell the solution to the higher-ups/customers/whoever." Every single time I've seen these signs, I've seen teams that fell apart, projects that were never completed, and most important to me, wasted my time and effort trying to help. I'm not saying that there isn't some chaos that can be coalesced into a real product or experience that you can be proud of and build on, but my personal experience is that what you describe is a usually a big fail on the way. And it will only continue or get worse. Your only hope there is if you can take charge of a project that is customer-facing and iterate directly with those customers on delivering usable software to those customers. Otherwise, you gotta get out.