OP here.

I think part of the message here is to not be afraid to come off as inexperienced as an engineer.

This particular call to rand() was written by a person with decades of experience with writing code like this. This person maybe isn't a starninjarock developer, but definitely experienced. Who did it? Let's git blame the code:

  13a3029435b core/lib/random.c (adamdunkels  2009-02-11 11:09:59 +0000 52)   return (unsigned short)rand();

(Yep, that's me!)