Most likely because if you are doing ML and do not have a PhD (or previous experience), you are just looking at calling a library function that you do not understand. The majority of &#x27;machine learning meetups&#x27; (not in the Bay Area), are attended by programmers that are looking to figure out how to call an R package to give them recommendations or similar items in a list (clustering).<p><i>edit</i> I just read the other replies to this post. I believe that most startups with Machine Learning teams are doing more than just calling R-libraries; most development work that I&#x27;ve done for myself and teams has been for tooling and operationalizing data infrastructure (i.e. data engineering, not data science). However if you need a simple recommendation for an app then calling the library methods without 100% understanding may be enough (but calling library methods without underlying understanding is a bad trait in a programmer (e.g. calling the sort() function without understanding quicksort)).