What is wrong with my oneToMany/manyToOne relation in Doctrine?

Question

I implemented a manyToMany relationship in Symfony2/Doctrine, where the relation is an Entity itself (that was necessary because I needed to add additional columns - notice that these additional columns are not mentioned below).

There are a couple of Q&As around here that recommend to take the relationship as an entity (e.g. here, here, here or here).

I have automatically generated all getter and setter methods via doctrine:generate:entities (this explains why it is called addCompanie instead of addCompany), so I would have thought that this covers my oneToMany/ManyToOne relationship.

And creating a User and a Company work fine so far. But as soon as I try to assign a user to a company I get the following error message:

Found entity of type Acme\MyBundle\Entity\User on association Acme\MyBundle\Entity\Company#employees, but expecting Acme\MyBundle\Entity\CompanyHasUser

These are my Doctrine definitions (yml):

# User
Acme\MyBundle\Entity\User:
  type: entity
  fields:
    id:
      id: true
      type: integer
      generator:
        strategy: AUTO
  oneToMany:
    companies:
      targetEntity: Acme\MyBundle\Entity\CompanyHasUser
      mappedBy: employees

# Company
Acme\MyBundle\Entity\Company:
  type: entity
  fields:
    id:
      id: true
      type: integer
      generator:
        strategy: AUTO
  oneToMany:
    employees:
      targetEntity: Acme\MyBundle\Entity\CompanyHasUser
      mappedBy: companies

# CompanyHasUser
Acme\MyBundle\Entity\CompanyHasUser:
  type: entity
  fields:
    id:
      id: true
      type: integer
      generator:
        strategy: AUTO
  manyToOne:
    companies:
      targetEntity: Acme\MyBundle\Entity\Company
      inversedBy: employees
      joinColumns:
        company_id:
          referencedColumnName: id
          nullable: false
    employees:
      targetEntity: Acme\MyBundle\Entity\User
      inversedBy: companies
      joinColumns:
        user_id:
          referencedColumnName: id
          nullable: false

This is what my Entity class User look like

namespace Acme\MyBundle\Entity;

class User
{
    private $id;
    private $companies;

    public function __construct()
    {
        $this->companies = new \Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection();
    }

    public function addCompany(\Acme\MyBundle\Entity\CompanyHasUser $companies)
    {
        $this->companies[] = $companies;

        return $this;
    }

    public function removeCompany(\Acme\MyBundle\Entity\CompanyHasUser $companies)
    {
        $this->companies->removeElement($companies);
    }

    public function getCompanies()
    {
        return $this->companies;
    }
}

This is what my Entity class Company look like

namespace Acme\MyBundle\Entity;

class Company
{
    private $id;
    private $employees;

    public function __construct($name, $companyAdmin)
    {
        $this->employees = new \Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection();
    }

    public function addEmployee(\Acme\MyBundle\Entity\CompanyHasUser $employees)
    {
        $this->employees[] = $employees;

        return $this;
    }

    public function removeEmployee(\Acme\MyBundle\Entity\CompanyHasUser $employees)
    {
        $this->employees->removeElement($employees);
    }

    public function getEmployees()
    {
        return $this->employees;
    }
}

And this is what my Entity class CompanyHasUser looks like (relation between User and Company, but as far as this relation contains further columns - not mentioned in these code snippets - I had to create it as an Entity):

namespace Acme\MyBundle\Entity;

class CompanyHasUser
{
    private $companies;
    private $employees;

    public function setCompanies(\Acme\MyBundle\Entity\Company $companies)
    {
        $this->companies = $companies;

        return $this;
    }

    public function getCompanies()
    {
        return $this->companies;
    }

    public function setEmployees(\Acme\MyBundle\Entity\User $employees)
    {
        $this->employees = $employees;

        return $this;
    }

    public function getEmployees()
    {
        return $this->employees;
    }
}

My Controller logic is:

// Create new User (employee)
$user = new User();
$em = $this->getDoctrine()->getManager();
$em->persist($user);

// Create new Company (employer)
$company = new Company();

// Create relationship
$company->addEmployee($user);
$em->persist($company);

// Flush
$em->flush();

Answer 1

I found it out with huge thanks to Bronchas answer here. Controller logic can be implemented as follows:

// Create new User (employee)
$user = new User();
$em = $this->getDoctrine()->getManager();
$em->persist($user);

// Create new Company (employer)
$company = new Company();
$em->persist($company);

// Employ User at Company
$employment = new CompanyHasUser();
$employment->setEmployees($user);
$employment->setCompanies($company);
$em->persist($employment);

// Flush
$em->flush();