It's not just at little companies that might be ephemeral. I work for a large media enterprise and have built a platform over more than half a year for them to

It's not just at little companies that might be ephemeral. I work for a large media enterprise and have built a platform over more than half a year for them to repeatedly waffle on whether or not they will use it each production round before moving against it at the last second. They requested I build it in the first place, and continue to bring up the issue to draw me back to development hours with new issues or feature requests. It hasn't been used in production end-to-end once. Madness. It ends up making me look terribly unproductive and ineffectual. Thankfully I have had good bosses who understand and back me up regardless.