Which Veteran and Rookie Pilots Fit the Payroll

PandasHardSenior level~10 min

Problem

You are given a DataFrame `pilots` with columns `pilot_id`, `rank`, and `wage`. `pilot_id` uniquely identifies each pilot, `rank` is either `'Veteran'` or `'Rookie'`, and `wage` is the pilot's annual wage.

An airline has a hiring budget of `50000`. It first hires `Veteran` pilots, cheapest wage first (ties broken by smaller `pilot_id`), taking each while the running total of veteran wages stays within budget. With the leftover budget it then hires `Rookie` pilots under the same cheapest-first rule. Return the `pilot_id` of every pilot actually hired, in any order, in one column `pilot_id`.

Input data

Example rows — the live problem includes the full dataset.

pilots

pilot_id	rank	wage
1	Veteran	20000
2	Veteran	25000
3	Veteran	30000
4	Rookie	4000
5	Rookie	3000

Expected output

Your answer should return 3 rows with the columns pilot_id.

Starter code (Pandas (Python))

import pandas as pd

def which_veteran_and_rookie_pilots_fit_the_payroll(pilots) -> pd.DataFrame:
    # Your code here
    return pilots

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