Communism has the word "common" as it's root. It means common ownership of property, which is the same thing as non-existence of property (because property is defined by exclusive ownership). This implies non-existence of money, non-division of people into classes and impossibility of political power like we understand it.

Neither Soviet Union nor Maoist China had common ownership/non-existence of property - they had state control of property, where all the riches of those countries were managed by the bureaucratic ruling class. This ruling class forced people to work for money. There is absolutely nothing communist about exchanging work for money. Unlike entrepreneurs in free-market capitalism this bureaucratic ruling class managed their property collectively, but that is not so unusual - shareholders and corporations also manage property in common. What matters is that they have exclusive power which left most of people in those countries with little choice but to get a job and try to join the property managing class.

You might say that China and USSR had "realistic" communism, but this is not true because much more authentic forms of communism have existed in history. Many groups of hunter gatherer people often and share what they managed to find among themselves freely (or according to rules of gifting, not exchange). Diggers during the English Revolution (around 1650's) were a group that set out to work the land in common and share the products freely. The government rightly saw them a s a threat and suppressed them. In the Spanish Civil War in 1930's large parts of the country were controlled by anarchist-communists (several million people) who took "from each according to the ability to each according to need" principle seriously and collectivized factories and land. Their progress was uneven, but mostly it was directed towards greater communism. Their enterprise was prosperous until they were destroyed by the combination of USSR sabotage and fascist attack. There's a movie about it called "Living Utopia" if you care what real communism looks like. Wikipedia is another (very limited) communist project because it creates common wealth owned by no one and build by people who have the ability (and desire) to do this and used freely by anyone who wants to use it for the benefit of all.

Finally, there is nothing communist about stuff like "collective farms" in USSR because those enterprises were not controlled by their workers in any meaningful sense.

What these countries call themselves makes absolutely no difference to what they are. They are state capitalist economies because they have states, capital and a powerless working class, while communism is a movement (and not just some ideas in a book) aimed square against all of that. It would be nice to have a new word for people chipping in for common good as you say, but if this chipping in behavior was at all ambitious it would threaten all the existing powers of our world (governments & corporations) and sooner or later it would gain the same notoriety as "communism"

Some people here have mentioned that unionizing for IT workers might do some good, but it is either not feasible due to nature of IT work or has other drawbacks. I think IT workers (a broad category I know) should be talking about organizing first, unions second. Many of the official unions are just a different set of bosses, often fairly friendly to the original set. This does not mean that our attempts to collectively improve our conditions are doomed to harm us. Instead, how much the union works their members, how much for themselves and how much for the company depends mostly on how organized and conscious people already are in their workplace. When workers want to work more reasonable hours for a better pay and are willing to fight together, they will force their union to do the job. When the workers are apathetic, the union will manage them. The main advantages of the union are legal protections and national support, so it makes a sense to have one if people in a workplace already want to get organized, but it makes almost no sense to ask for outsiders to come from the union and organize the workplace.

IT workers organizing is not unprecedented. The first real IT strike I know of took place in 2004 at Schneider Electrics aka the GE of Europe, which produces electrical components and control systems. The company was planning to move 400 local IT workers (mostly doing tech support) to a different french company, which does outsourcing services. This meant each employee would take a 500 Euro monthly paycut and would work in worse conditions at the outsourcing shop. In response to these plans, IT workers went on strike, occupied their offices and seized some servers. The union was not happy and provided almost no support. The workers had their own daily assemblies where they discussed their situations and decided how to act. They received some support from factory floor (blue collar) workers. Ultimately they voted to end the strike and occupation, since the company wasn't willing to negotiate and the union was not willing to defend them. Although this was not a measurable victory, it's not defeat either - this sort of action makes it harder for the company to outsource people in the future. For the IT workers it was their first real strike, which changed their attitudes towards work and collective action. Some of them were not union members, but described the strike as something they had to do - the pay cut meant trouble paying mortgages. A more detailed account (unfortunately rather politicized and not always clear, but still very valuable) is here Strike and occupation of IT workers at Schneider Electrics.

Organizing Info (union or no union)
Workplace Organizing
General Organizing