Second Highest Salary
Kestrel Labs hands out one runner-up equity grant a year and, by a rule nobody enjoys explaining, it goes to the second-best-paid person in the company — the top earner already has a package of their own. People Ops needs the name and the figure to put in the letter.
Nothing in the table marks second place. Pay is just a column of numbers, and the person who is second today may be fourth after the next review, so the position has to be worked out from the salaries every time the query runs.
employees — one row per employee. salary is annual, in dollars. manager_id points at another employee, or is NULL.
| 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, name and salary, for the employee with the second-highest salary company-wide. Exactly one row.
Example output — shape only, on an invented payroll.
| name | salary |
|---|---|
| Yusuf Bello | 139000 |
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