Combined Employee and Contractor List - Medium SQL Set Operations Interview Problem

Problem

HR needs a single roster of all workers — both employees and contractors. Using the employees and contractors tables, return name, department, and type (either 'employee' or 'contractor') for everyone, ordered by name.

Schema

employees

column	type
id	INTEGER
name	TEXT
department	TEXT
salary	INTEGER

contractors

column	type
id	INTEGER
name	TEXT
department	TEXT
hourly_rate	NUMERIC

Sample Data

employees

id	name	department	salary
1	Alice	Engineering	120000
2	Bob	Marketing	80000

contractors

id	name	department	hourly_rate
1	Carol	Engineering	75.00
2	Dave	HR	60.00

Expected Output

name	department	type
Alice	Engineering	employee
Bob	Marketing	employee
Carol	Engineering	contractor
Dave	HR	contractor

All four workers appear in a single list sorted alphabetically by name. The type column distinguishes which table each row came from.

Hints