BTW one example of a long-running task would be a genome assembly task. You take in raw reads in a tar of fastq files, turn it into a BAM file, and from there find overlapping read sections so you can detect continuous read zones, and then determine the consensus nucleotide sequence in each contiguous read zone.

What happens if someone trips over a power cord after a week of this job running? How do you detect and recover? What if, due to the size of data passed in, the job takes a week longer than expected?

This is why you cannot always reduce a work queue to a message queue.