Top Earner per Department
Every department head at Kestrel Labs has been sent the same one-line question ahead of the pay round: what is the top of the range on your team today? It is a benchmarking figure — a head cannot argue for a new hire at a given level without knowing what the ceiling on their own team already is.
One sheet covers all four heads, one row each, in team-number sequence so each head can find their own line without reading the others.
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.
| id | name | department_id | salary | hire_date | manager_id |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ava Chen | 1 | 145000 | 2021-03-14 | NULL |
| 2 | Ben Ortiz | 1 | 118000 | 2022-06-01 | 1 |
| 3 | Cara Novak | 1 | 121000 | 2023-01-10 | 1 |
| 4 | Deshawn Lee | 2 | 95000 | 2020-09-23 | NULL |
| 5 | Elin Kask | 2 | 88000 | 2022-11-05 | 4 |
| 6 | Farid Amiri | 3 | 76000 | 2023-04-18 | NULL |
| 7 | Grace Kim | 4 | 132000 | 2021-07-30 | NULL |
| 8 | Hugo Silva | 4 | 110000 | 2023-02-14 | 7 |
| 9 | Ines Duarte | 4 | 104000 | 2023-08-01 | 7 |
| 10 | Jonas Weber | 2 | 91000 | 2021-12-19 | 4 |
The table already exists in the database — there is nothing to create or load.
Task: Write a query returning two columns, department_id and top_salary (the largest salary among the people on that team), one row per team that has at least one employee, ordered by department_id ascending. Return the salary figure only — not the name of the person earning it.
Example output — shape only, on invented teams. Only the pay figure comes back, never the name of the person on it:
| department_id | top_salary |
|---|---|
| 21 | 168000 |
| 24 | 93500 |
| 27 | 210000 |
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