Client wants some cool feature -> I spend a week coding it -> shit's cool -> client updates the design -> the feature is gone from the design

I still get paid by the hour but uhhhhhhhh it really makes me feel like my work is pointless.

Because it is. We all die.

If the feature has a clear goal and its measurable, then you can fight to keep it.

I get kinda depressed those times tbh...

That’s cute. Wait until you’re pushing twenty years into this career and realize that NOTHING you created over 12 years ago is still being used. But you know what did happen? You learned. You grew your skills. You paid your bills and got to say that you had one of the most transformative and influential jobs humans have ever done: you told computers what to do, and those computers changed human existence. It’s easy to be ground down by a career writing software, but if you pull back and look at what you do in the scale of human existence - it’s pretty fucking awesome.