Who's the Runner-Up in Pay?
Payroll at Kestrel Labs is benchmarking the top of the pay scale against a market survey, and the founder's salary distorts the picture. What the analyst actually asked for is the person on the next rung down: the runner-up across the whole company, not the runner-up on any one team.
Finding the single highest salary is a one-move question. The runner-up is not, because "second" is a position rather than a value — there is no column you can filter on that says so. And a definition has to be pinned before the query can be written: if two people were tied at the top, does the runner-up mean the second of those two, or the next person below the shared figure? The two readings give different answers, and the report wants the first one.
employees — one row per person. salary is annual pay in dollars.
| 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 exactly one row with two columns, name and salary, for the second-best-paid employee in the company. "Second" means positional: arrange everybody best paid first and take the person standing in the second position. So if two people shared the top salary, this returns the second of that pair — still on the top figure — rather than the next lower salary.
Example output — shape only, on an invented payroll.
| name | salary |
|---|---|
| Yusuf Bello | 138500 |
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