Actually, it was invite-only when I was there. But that's sort of besides the point. It's irrelevant whether or not it's an "honor" to be on the hiring committee. The point is that being on the hiring committee does give you some insight as to why people tend to get rejected. Without being on the hiring committee, you really only see why you're rejecting people -- smaller sample size, biased, less diversity of questions, etc. But, for hiring committee members, you see the results of many people's interviews.

I'm on 3 of our hiring committees, and i've been at google for over 6 years. It hasn't been invite only for as long i've been here, AFAIK. Either that, or I was secretly invited!

It is irrelevant whether it's an honor, but as to whether it gives you insight, you are generally right but you did miss an important point:

The vast majority of people who are "members" of a given hiring committee often don't show up every week. A lot, in fact, show up never, but are still members. (for example, they were part of it years ago and nobody removed them, they got asked, said yes, never actually did anything, etc)

So while you are correct that it does give you some insight if you actively participated, simply being a "member" of a hiring committee is a necessary but not sufficient condition to say that you have that insight.

That doesn't seem to be a point missed so much as one that's obvious and generally unnecessary to state fully qualified descriptions of everything in casual conversation.

Except that when you are using it as marketing in a book, there are very important distinctions.

Lies of omission and all that.

A lie of omission would apply if you state a selection of true facts and ignore other ones so as to make yourself look better than you are.

In this case, I'm stating that I was a hiring committee member and not saying that I attended regularly, when I in fact did. This is not a lie of omission. At worst, you could accuse me of not offering additional qualifications.

I was in Seattle / Kirkland, and it was invite only there. I showed up every week (as did the vast majority of the Kirkland HC).

But, yes, I could have been more extensive in my credentials. Unfortunately, "How to Crack the Toughest Coding Interviews by ex-Google engineer, ex-Google hiring committee member who showed up every week, ex-Apple dev, ex-Microsoft dev, author of Cracking the Coding Interview, and author of The Google Resume" was a bit too long :).

Fair :) I'm just used to MTV HC's, where you may have 75 HC members, and 10 active ones.

I expect the "newer" offices (relatively, of course) may not have this issue.