I've literally never had the thought of "how do I influence other people." Why is that considered a valuable skill? It just sounds like a nicer version of "manipulation".

If other people are not smart enough to see why your ideas are superior then you need to explain it to them or otherwise convince them to go along somehow.

Most of my "influencing" is just repeatedly explaining things to people and letting them think through all the bad ideas and dead ends themselves.

> I've literally never had the thought of "how do I influence other people." Why is that considered a valuable skill?

If you're a software developer you must have thought "current priorities are not right, we should do X for the users / Y to get better quality" and tried to influence your management to get those priorities moved. Maybe by starting a campaign with your users so the demands come from multiple services and not just you, or by measuring quality indicators and showing how what you want to implement would improve them etc.

That's why you want to start getting coffee with people, maybe go outside with the smokers. It can take months of "work" to get people to propose the idea you want done.

But this kind of influencing won't help your career.

Do you consider educating people “manipulation”?

trying to make a convincing argument about anything is "influencing" people. its manipulation if you are trying to convince someone of something you know benefits you more than the person.