Doing a decorator Java program. Why does it show a mismatch?

I have a question regarding a program I'm doing for school. I have to do the following:

> Write a Java program that uses decorator classes to add capabilities
> to employees. In a typical company, an employee will be asked to
> perform a number of duties, such as Department Head, Safety
> Coordinator, Recruiter, or Community Liason. You should have
> additional ones besides those. Your Java program will create Employees
> and then decorate these employees at runtime.
>
> Create an abstract class named Employee, with last name and
> description fields, and a getDescription() method. Create a concrete
> class named SalariedEmployee that extends Employee. Create an abstract
> class named ResponsibilityDecorator that is able to decorate an
> employee and return the employee's responsibility as a string. It will
> have an abstract getDescription method. Create some job category
> classes that extend the ResponsibilityDecorator class and implement
> the getDescription() method.
>
> In your main test program, create at least 5 Employee objects and pass
> them to the constructors of each of your decorator classes. The first
> employee should be you so use your last name. Then, print each
> Employee by calling its getDescription() method. All employees should
> not have the same number of responsibilities. The program's output
> should look something like this for each :
>
> [LastName]: Manager, Recruiter, CommunityLiaison, ProductionDesigner

Here's what I've done so far:

Employee.java:

import java.util.*;

public abstract class Employee 
{
	String lastName, description;

	public String getDescription()
	{
		return description;
	}

}

SalariedEmployee.java:

import java.util.*;

public abstract class SalariedEmployee extends Employee
{
	String lastName, description;
	
	public abstract String getDescription();
}

ResponsibilityDecorator.java:

import java.util.*;

public abstract class ResponsibilityDecorator
{
	public String getDescription()
	{
		return employee.getDescription();
	}
	
	Employee employee;

	public Employee getEmployee() {
		return employee;
	}

	public void setEmployee(Employee employee) {
		this.employee = employee;
	}

	public boolean equals(Object obj) {
		return employee.equals(obj);
	}

	public int hashCode() {
		return employee.hashCode();
	}

	public String toString() {
		return employee.toString();
	}

	public ResponsibilityDecorator(Employee employee) {
		super();
		this.employee = employee;
	}

	public ResponsibilityDecorator() {
		super();
		// TODO Auto-generated constructor stub
	}
}

Rodriguez.java (first employee class)

import java.util.*;

public abstract class Rodriguez extends ResponsibilityDecorator 
{
	Employee employee1;
	
	String lastName = "Rodriguez";
	String description = "Tech Support";
	
	public Rodriguez (Employee employee1)
	{
		this.employee = employee;
	}
	
	public String getDescription()
	{
		return description;
	}
}

Doe.java (second employee class):

import java.util.*;

public abstract class Doe extends ResponsibilityDecorator 
{
	Employee employee2;
	
	String lastName = "Doe";
	String description = "Security Guard, Police Officer";
	
	public Doe (Employee employee2)
	{
		this.employee = employee;
	}
	
	public String getDescription()
	{
		return description;
	}
}

Jill.java (third employee object):

import java.util.*;

public abstract class Doe extends ResponsibilityDecorator 
{
	Employee employee2;
	
	String lastName = "Doe";
	String description = "Security Guard, Police Officer";
	
	public Doe (Employee employee2)
	{
		this.employee = employee;
	}
	
	public String getDescription()
	{
		return description;
	}
}

Maria.java (fourth employee class):

import java.util.*;

public abstract class Maria extends ResponsibilityDecorator
{
	Employee employee4;
	
	String lastName = "Maria";
	String description = "Receptionist, Valet, Cashier, Restock";
	
	public Maria (Employee employee4)
	{
		this.employee = employee;
	}
	
	public String getDescription()
	{
		return description;
	}
}

James.java (fifth employee class):

import java.util.*;

public abstract class James extends ResponsibilityDecorator
{
	Employee employee5;
	
	String lastName = "James";
	String description = "Manager, CEO, Economy, President, Analytics";
	
	public James (Employee employee5)
	{
		this.employee = employee;
	}
	
	public String getDescription()
	{
		return description;
	}
}

Test.java:

import java.util.*;

public class Test 
{

	public static void main(String[] args)
	{
		Employee employee1 = new Rodriguez();
		System.out.println("Rodriguez:" + 
				employee1.getDescription());
		
		Employee employee2 = new Doe();
		System.out.println("Doe" + 
				employee2.getDescription());
		
		Employee employee3 = new Jill();
		System.out.println("Jill:" + 
				employee3.getDescription());
		
		Employee employee4 = new Maria();
		System.out.println("Maria:" + 
				employee4.getDescription());
		
		Employee employee5 = new James();
		System.out.println("James:" + 
				employee5.getDescription());
	}
}

For some reason, it shows a type mismatch error. I 've been searching around the Internet and I even asked some people. I tried many fixes, but they just create another error. I don't know how to fix this problem.

You are creating instances of objects of Type Employee
But none of them have a relationship or are children of the Employee class according to your code.

You defined what a Employee and Salary employee is, but none of your people objects extends them.

There seem to be several problems here. Let's go through the assignment text:

> Create an abstract class named Employee, with last name and description fields, and a getDescription() method.

This looks OK

> Create a concrete class named SalariedEmployee that extends Employee.

You made SalariedEmployee an abstract class. Remove abstract and implement the getDescription method.

> Create an abstract class named ResponsibilityDecorator that is able to decorate an employee and return the employee's responsibility as a string. It will have an abstract getDescription method.

According to the decorator pattern I'm familiar with, ResponsibilityDecorator should extend Employee if it's supposed to "decorate an employee" - have you been taught something else?

From the description of the task I would expect to see:

abstract class ResponsibilityDecorator extends Employee {
    Employee employee;
    ResponsibilityDecorator(Employee e) { this.employee = e; }
    abstract String getDescription();
}

> Create some job category classes that extend the ResponsibilityDecorator class and implement the getDescription() method.

You have not done this, unless you consider Maria, Rodriguez etc "job categories."

A "Manager" job category could look like this:

class Manager extends ResponsibilityDecorator {
    Manager(Employee employee) { super(employee); }
    String getDescription() { return employee.getDescription() + " Manager"; }
}

> In your main test program, create at least 5 Employee objects

Perhaps you confused this step the previous one and created 5 employee classes (Maria, Rodriguez, ...)?

Do note that the solution to this exercise would leave professional developers scratching their head, because this is not a reasonable way to represent job categories or responsibilities in a program.

Some basic OOP concepts are mismatch in the code.
<br>
abstract class cannot be used on initialization (as you did)
<br> Employee employee1 = new Rodriguez();
<br> line code is fine, but the error is derived from Rodriguez class
<br>Try change class def with:
<br>public class Rodriguez extends ResponsibilityDecorator
<br>This will not fix the issue since no relation between Rodriguez_ResponsibilityDecorator(type) and Employee(type) but is a step further in understanding the code.(only have an instance var as Employeeembedded on ResponsibilityDecorator. It could be used to redesign the code and made the link with an Employee, but I doubt that you'll follow the pattern.(noted as an alternate solution)

<br>Usually all employees should derived from Employee then a proper code-adjustment will be public class Rodriguez extends Employee ... and after the code should be adapted.(from here you should start).Just look again on pattern.
<br>
<br>One more hint, proper Name_Rodriguez is not an adequate class def, it's more like a property of an instance. Eg:Employee e1 = new CustomEmployee("Rodriguez","last name", age_int) and CustomEmployee it's a concrete class which extends Employee ... (Employee could be abstract or interface)