A "Fachinformatiker" (for some reason translated as specialist by google translate) you can become through an apprenticeship in Germany for some time (there where predecessors to it with different names)
As a fellow german, but not a Fachinformatiker, I suspect colleagues without a degree still have a hard time to work their way up into more advanced management roles or just into the higher income brackets. I wish that would not be the case though.
What I find intriguing, although I'm surrounded by "Programmers", almost no CS! We have physicist, mechanical engineers, mathematicians, historians and english majors even.
see http://translate.google.de/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=...
oder auf deutsch http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fachinformatiker
so it is nothing new at all.