Freelancers working on digital labor platforms have to deal with many challenges. IT freelancers should be considered separately due to special characteristics such as high skill level or collaborative nature of IT work. Through a Latent Dirichlet Allocation analysis of 2804 forum posts with over 20,000 comments from IT freelancers and additional qualitative analysis, we assign themes to each identified topic, cluster them into aggregated dimensions, and illustrate the interrelationships in a model of IT freelancing. Thus, we examine the challenges of IT freelancers and synthesize them. We extend the challenges of online freelancing already outlined in the literature and identify four IT-specific challenges for IT freelancers. Therefore, we improve our understanding of how IT work is performed on digital labor platforms and which particular aspects should be considered in future research. Furthermore, we highlight implications for practitioners, i.e., IT freelancers on the one hand and platform owners on the other hand.

在数字劳动力平台上工作的自由职业者必须应对许多挑战。由于 IT 工作的高技能水平或协作性质等特殊特征，应单独考虑 IT 自由职业者。通过对 2804 个论坛帖子以及来自 IT 自由职业者的 20,000 多条评论的潜在狄利克雷分配分析以及其他定性分析，我们为每个确定的主题分配主题，将它们聚类到聚合维度中，并说明 IT 自由职业者模型中的相互关系。因此，我们研究并综合了 IT 自由职业者面临的挑战。我们扩展了文献中已经概述的在线自由职业的挑战，并为 IT 自由职业者确定了四个特定于 IT 的挑战。因此，我们加深了对 IT 工作如何在数字劳动力平台上进行以及在未来的研究中应考虑哪些特定方面的理解。此外，我们强调了对从业者的影响，即一方面是 IT 自由职业者，另一方面是平台所有者。