Fixing other people's code is actually part of the job. The more "s*t" you fix, the better you understand the toolset and the better developer you become by ma

Fixing other people's code is actually part of the job. The more "s*t" you fix, the better you understand the toolset and the better developer you become by making better decisions. The powerless feeling you have could be because a certain toolset is currently new to you. Eg. I received a legacy project from a junior developer ( an important one), it took me 4 months to fix all ( and huge) issues. Now it takes me 5-10 minutes to identify an issue ( after improvements). It's a similar situation, but from a big internal project instead of a "small" library. While your manager doesn't pay you to solve an issue from an external tool. He does pay you to solve the issue in the internal project. It's the same thing, but another perspective. If you need to spend 2 days in that opensource project and you're sure that's the cause, so be it. A manager "only" cares about the end-result, not the road to it.