Above the Line

Retention planning at Kestrel Labs starts from a blunt premise: the people most expensive to replace are usually the people already paid above the middle of the company. HR wants that list — everyone earning more than the company-wide average — as the starting population for a retention review, best paid first.

The catch is that the threshold is not a number anyone can type. It is computed from the same table being filtered, and it changes the moment anyone is hired, promoted or leaves. Hard-coding today's figure produces a query that is wrong next month and never says so.

employees — one row per person. department_id is the team they sit on, given as the matching id in departments; salary is annual pay in dollars; hire_date is the day they started, written year-month-day; manager_id is the id of the person they report to, and is NULL for anyone who reports to nobody.

The table already exists in the database — there is nothing to create or load.

Task: Write a query returning two columns, name and salary, one row per employee paid strictly more than the average salary across all employees — equal to the average does not qualify. Order the rows by salary, highest first; no two salaries in the result are equal.

Example output — shape only, on invented people and pay: