The saying goes: it takes ten years to become an overnight success.
As for the stick or twist question, if your only goal is to make money then twisting whenever it seems to make that more likely makes sense. Most people thrive on doing work they care about enough to stick with when it is hard, and my guess is that gets better results over time.
One bit of practical advice: celebrate the little successes on the way to whatever you may think a big success looks like. Wherever the journey ends up, it's important to enjoy it as much as possible.
TL;DR: Bureaucracy in public institutions is not principally a management pathology. It is the cumulative result of a largely logical process. It is generated by policy and rendered permanent by asymmetric incentives. Nobody decides to create it; nobody is readily positioned to undo it.
Done this. Good question but I don't think it's the most helpful way of thinking about it.
Every new recruit brings their own assumptions about how organizations / employment / etc. work and many of those assumptions won't be visible until after a while. This is especially true for managers.
I found Charles Handy's thinking about four types of organisational culture very helpful and I wish I'd found it earlier in the process.
AI summary: Charles Handy identified four types of organizational cultures: Power Culture, where decision-making is centralized among a few; Role Culture, which is based on defined roles and responsibilities; Task Culture, focused on teamwork to achieve specific goals; and Person Culture, where individual interests take precedence over the organization.
Basically, 15>50 is very likely to involve a shift from one of these to another one and making that open and explicit could help you a lot (including understanding how the role of senior managers needs to change).
The book is Understanding Organisations from 1976 but still valuable.
Saw this mentioned in a comment recently, I just downloaded, installed and used it to find a file while Windows Search was still saying 'Working on it...'. So I thought others might like to know.
I'm curious what about Fedora specifically makes the difference for you? I started using Cinnamon with Mint (derived from Ubuntu, Debian) last year and also found it a big improvement from Windows.
As for the stick or twist question, if your only goal is to make money then twisting whenever it seems to make that more likely makes sense. Most people thrive on doing work they care about enough to stick with when it is hard, and my guess is that gets better results over time.
One bit of practical advice: celebrate the little successes on the way to whatever you may think a big success looks like. Wherever the journey ends up, it's important to enjoy it as much as possible.