Highest Budget-per-Employee Department
Kestrel Labs is planning next year's headcount, and the CFO has a complaint about the current planning sheet: it lines the teams up by budget, and on that measure Engineering wins every single year. Engineering is also the biggest team. What she wants instead is the department with the most money standing behind each person on it — the one with room to hire well, rather than just room to hire.
The awkward part is that nothing in the schema records how big a team is. departments holds the money and nothing else; team size exists only as the number of employee rows pointing back at that department.
departments
| id | name | budget |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Engineering | 900000 |
| 2 | Sales | 400000 |
| 3 | Marketing | 250000 |
| 4 | Data | 500000 |
employees — one row per person; department_id points at departments.id.
| 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 tables are already created and filled in the editor — there is nothing to read from input.
Task: Write a query that returns a single row — name and budget_per_employee — for the department with the highest budget divided by its headcount, rounded to 2 decimals. Watch the arithmetic: budget and headcount are both stored as whole numbers. A department with nobody on it has no meaningful figure and should not appear.
Example output — shape only, on an invented team and figure.
| name | budget_per_employee |
|---|---|
| Facilities | 212333.33 |
Sign in to solve this problem
Reading problems is free for everyone — solving them (Run, Submit, and tracking what you've solved) needs an account.
Sign in