Top Departments by Headcount

Adobe: Find the top 2 departments by headcount and summarize typical pay in each.

Assignment

The HR team has shared two exports, one of employees and one of departments, ahead of an upcoming headcount planning review, and wants a quick analysis before sharing the numbers.

Deliverables

• The top 2 departments by headcount.
• The typical pay in each department.
• A short closing report of your findings for the HR team, including anything they should double-check before relying on the numbers.

Data Description

adobe_employees.csv - one row per employee:

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

adobe_departments.csv - one row per department:

• department_id
• department_name
• location

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.