Department Runner-Up Salary Members

A compensation analytics service stores one row per employee in a table named employees.

Table: employees

• emp_id: unique employee identifier
• salary: employee salary
• dept: department label

Your task is to identify employees who sit in the second salary tier of their department.

Definition of second salary tier:

1. Within each department, take DISTINCT salary values.
2. Sort those values in descending order.
3. Pick the second value in that ordering.
4. Return every employee in that department whose salary equals that value.

Important behavior:

• If multiple employees share the second-highest salary, include all of them.
• If a department has fewer than two distinct salary values, it contributes no rows.
• Input row order is arbitrary and must not affect the result.

Return exactly these columns in this order:

• emp_id
• dept

Final ordering:

• emp_id ascending

Supported submission environments:

• SQL (SQLite 3.27.2)
• Pandas (Python)