I have a coding assignment where I have a set spending budget that needs to ideally be brought as close to 0 as possible, that will be solely spent on funding employee wages. The only thing that is changeable is the amount of hours logged per employee; the employee hourly pay must be assigned to each employee prior to calculation. The employee list must be a constant, as well as the budget, but the coding algorithm must be volatile enough to work with different numbers (such as number of employees/work rates/ etc.). Additionally, the hours worked can only be in half-hour increments (0.5, 1, 1.5, etc.).

Preferably, would like to use Matlab, C/C++, or Python, but other HLL languages are fine too.