February 22, 2026
When the comments write the real story
IT Staffing Firms (TCS, Cognizant, Infosis Underpay Developers by 80–100%
Readers Roast ‘80–100% Underpaid’ Claim as H1B Exposé Backfires
TLDR: A fiery article claiming Indian IT firms underpay foreign tech workers by up to 40% compared to giants like Google got absolutely shredded by readers, who mocked the math, the clickbait framing, and even asked if an AI wrote it. The real story became a bigger debate about exploitation, bad stats, and the future of cheap tech labor.
The article set out to blow the lid off big Indian IT outsourcing firms allegedly underpaying foreign workers on H1B visas, but the real explosion happened in the comments. One reader immediately torched the headline math, saying “underpaying by 100%” doesn’t even make sense, then dragged the site for being all fluff and no facts, calling it basically unreadable. Another jumped in to say comparing pay at outsourcing shops to the absolute top of the tech world is like comparing your local diner to a Michelin-star restaurant — by that logic, everyone is underpaid.
The community quickly turned the “investigation” into a critique of the article itself. People asked if it was written by an AI, with one commenter suggesting the site should have to slap an “LLM-written” warning label on top like a junk food sticker. Others broadened the outrage, pointing out that U.S. government contractors pull a similar move, skimming 50–70% margins off workers’ pay, so this isn’t just an India-or-immigration story, it’s a whole business model. And of course, someone had to drop the future shock angle, asking what happens when artificial intelligence hits this cheap-labor industry — do the underpaid coders get replaced by even cheaper robots? In the end, the community didn’t just question the salary gap; they questioned the storytelling, the stats, and whether we’re already living in the AI-written clickbait era.
Key Points
- •Large IT outsourcing firms such as Cognizant, TCS, Infosys, Wipro, and HCL Technologies are among the biggest H1B sponsors, collectively filing over 21,000 petitions in 2026 with average salaries around $98,000–$105,000.
- •The article claims these firms pay H1B workers roughly 38–42% less than major U.S. tech product companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon for similar roles.
- •It attributes the pay gap to the outsourcing “body shop” model and the classification of workers at lower H1B wage levels, which legally allows below-market compensation while staying within Department of Labor rules.
- •The article describes broader impacts: wage suppression for H1B and American workers, job displacement incidents where U.S. employees train H1B replacements, and reputational issues for the H1B program.
- •It notes a regulatory shift including a reported 70% decline in H1B approvals for Indian IT firms, a 2025 policy imposing a $100,000 fee per new H1B application, and a proposed move to salary-weighted selection that would favor higher-paying roles.