Second-Highest Salary

Accenture: Find the second-highest salary and compare approaches that scale.

Assignment

The compensation team has exported the current employee salary data for an upcoming pay review, and wants a quick analysis before sharing the numbers. This lookup gets re-run every cycle and against much larger datasets, so they care not only about the number itself but about how it is calculated.

Deliverables

• The second-highest salary on record.
• More than one way to compute it, and which approach works best as the data gets larger.
• A short closing report of your findings for the compensation team, including anything they should double-check before relying on the numbers.

Data Description

accenture_employees.csv has one row per employee:

• employee_id
• full_name
• title - job title
• salary
• hire_date

Practicalities

You can solve this in Python, SQL, or a mix of both — StrataScratch notebooks support both languages in the same notebook.

Assume this data comes directly from the HR system and hasn't been cleaned, so review it carefully before relying on the numbers. When something looks off, work out what it is and decide how to handle it; when a definition or a final decision is genuinely ambiguous, choose a reasonable option and explain why. There's often more than one valid way to compute a result, so explain the approach you take and the reasoning behind your choices.

What's assessed: your results, and how clearly you explain what you see in the data and justify the choices you make.