Top 3 Highest-Paid Employees
The CFO of Kestrel Labs is preparing a compensation slide for the board. The slide has room for three lines: the three best-paid people in the company, biggest figure at the top, with the salary beside each name.
Salary sits right there on the employee row, so nothing has to be looked up. The catch is a different one: the table is arranged the way people were hired, which is no help at all when the question is about pay, and the slide has space for three lines rather than for everybody.
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 three best-paid employees, biggest salary first.
Example output — shape only; the figures below are invented, not this data's answer.
| name | salary |
|---|---|
| Rosa Kwan | 162000 |
| Yusuf Bello | 154000 |
| Mira Kovac | 139500 |
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